​The Distance Between Things

​

What is there in the distance between things
that gives stars grandeur, hates us, renders living
spare and, most of all, is difficult
to bridge?

The living rooms of houses across town,
miles off, homely details blotted, but down
where seeing grows heavy with feeling bright
their windows burn.

What is it that turns porch lights into space,
distant suburbs into firmament, unmarred
by dusk's stretch, domestic quarrels sunk, and
impossible to hold?

The white reach of some far gone ridge, the soul's
mind climbing towards a line of brute snow,
the cold spine, something falling through a dream
away and away and beautiful
for all that,

such as receding sleep, closest and furthest
of all our homes, a peak and a well, the crest
and sink, a world away from mountains,
but akin.

What is there in the distance between things
that turns a shared bed into a breathing 
gulf? We live beneath each other's skins but,
in sleep and waking, branch.

The gaps between words. All that is not said
and all that hurts when spoken, growing dead
out of the mouth, because when speaking out
one is always on the edge of all living,
but when the hunter's call rings in the distance 
it sings.

What is there in the distance between things?
The porch star in the valley, the closing
of doors, high mist, our painful intimacies.
The navigation of what's next to us
​and, moving outwards, gone. 


​


​ an earlier, abridged version of the above poem appeared in Agenda's 26th 'New Generation Poets' broadsheet