In the future I will have different colored hair and eyes and I will be three inches taller. I will stand straight-backed and watch you sleeping, no sound in the room except the old fan cutting through dulled air.

In the future I will not feel the pain of our touch and our separation, I will hold you like a heavy coiled pendant around my neck, claiming us in precious metal, unbreakable. Your nipples are flowers, hardly touching earth.

At the beginning, when I was another person, when you were another person, I believe fire rained down from the sky, falling between the pruned winter trees, urging to sprout for spring.

I remember the taste of the metal chairs in the courtyard that no longer exists, though not long ago, young people who knew nothing of our death, sat in those same chairs, pushing hair out of their faces, like you did with mine.

My white jeans, thin like I was, the shape of then, broken and mended, still capable of growth, like the trees, their shorn heads, bald against late chill, the night stretching indivisibly ahead.

I couldn’t drive well. I drove to you. Stray cats wound around the table legs, searching with amber eyes. We drank until our bellies hurt, all I could think about was that. The ache that wouldn’t sate. Your throat.

When I fell beneath you, I let go of the past like an unwanted necklace. I wasn’t her. I was yours. You pushed inside me like an ocean and we stayed, drowning in place, until we could breathe beneath water.

I’ve always been led by passion; it’s my proclivity, it’s your nature. The scars on my timeline attest. You lose focus, each year takes a little more of you away, until you are like a reflection in oil spilt on the road, blurred by rain.

In the future I will have different colored hair and eyes and I will be three inches taller. I will tell you my breasts hurt because your mouth is not on them. They have not outgrown that moment, I have not outgrown that need.

In the future you will lay still, in a way you never could, you will be unrecognizable, and painted over, you will not taste the same, you will not sound the same, things will be so different I will question my sanity.

The train always passed through at 3am. I woke listening to it. Remembering how you moved inside me, bruised me, how I couldn’t wake without wanting you to begin all over again. Purple flowers on the windowsill, stark color against white walls. Nothing else. Just you and I.

It makes a low whistle, it sounds like a woman moaning, it sounds like me. You went so deep you know me better than I have ever known myself, did I hurt you? You ask. I never tell the truth. I say, no, please don’t stop. Until you find a reason to. There is no reason to.

They say drinking dairy causes breast pain, keeps your waist-line thin and your bones strong, but like anything, once you’re older, there’s no nutrition to be found in milk. Better to run. Find that road with the oil again. Scour it with your tired early morning eyes. Looking for you. Trying to find that feeling, where only trees without heads sleep. To the sound of rain and a soreness, lost now, close and yet, not.

20 Replies to “Close and yet, not.”

  1. Thank you. Honestly the other day I thought about shutting up shop. Poetry, maybe writing in general is an odd pursuit, we want to be able to do it without the approval of others, but we feel easily invisible and question the worth of doing. So what others think does matter, and oftentimes since I left WP land, I get little feedback and wonder why I’m doing it, what I’m doing it for. I am not brimming with self-confidence about my writing, I see how others think they are superb – that’s not where I’m coming from – at the same time I want to be impactful or leave a message, though it seems a little futile. Christine is doing a good job of her prompts and seems busy in that and I feel like I belonged to something once but not presently – as if everything has changed – or been lost – and maybe I just need to step away from those things that are empty and fill my pockets with something lasting – I wonder if anything is lasting though. It seems in today’s world things are always ephemeral. Good for poems. Not good for the heart. Thank you dear one, for reading and being a friend.

  2. I think it is hard, maybe impossible, to predict what will last, especially poetry, as it is also to know who-where-when will find in a poem the very thing the feeling or struggle they have tried to find the words for, or in which they thought they were alone in the world. We just don’t know, so have to just write from the heart and take our best shot. What I know for sure is that I don’t want to miss any of your writing, poetry or prose.

  3. Us do! Thinking of things lasting, I wondered whether Homer, when he was singing his stories to whoever it was he did, ever imagined that going on 3,000 years later those stories would still be told and enjoyed.

  4. Oh my heart… Candice. This is magnificent in its beauty. I clung to every word, nearly shattered. I simply cannot imagine a world without you in it. Honestly. I can’t. Never ever stop, I beg you. Your words have moved me.

  5. I’ve never read someone who could describe their emotions or moments experienced the way you do, Candy! The visual impact these lines create, damn! Just amazing. Please don’t ever stop. <3

  6. Well writers are among the most egocentric people I have known so ‘maybe’ but I would guess, not, because in those days, life was so fleeting, I doubt anyone really thought in terms of legacies, least of all if you were not royal or similar. Later on though, the romantics (poets/artists) I think they did I think it was even contrived. It doesn’t diminish the brilliance of some of their work but it’s more self-conscious. I think now that’s exactly our problem – self-conscious but not in that shy way, quite the reverse. Everyone expects to be famous, to be exceptional, and we’re less than we ever were. I wonder if you can put it back in the box once it’s out? Probably not. then again maybe Homer did – maybe he smoked hashish and told his friends ‘they’re gonna read me in the future!’ – I’d like to think not. I’d like to think there was a time people just ‘did’ and without the artifice of expectation. But maybe that’s not human nature? Makes me think of that line in Paradise Lost, where they were ‘changed’ after eating the apple and having carnal knowledge in a different way. I have often thought it was a relevant metaphor, for so many things, not least that little angst that comes after passion and joy, where you come back down to earth and everything that was technicolor is no longer and you sigh and wish things were different. Maybe humans are just always malcontent with their destiny.

  7. Have you ever read Françoise Sagan? She’s brilliant at it. I recommend Sunlight on Cold Water. There is an English translation. The other one is By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, by Elizabeth Smart (not THE Liz Smart of kidnapping infamy) – those to me are some of the most passionate novellas ever written. Maybe Anais Nin Little Birds or the Cheri series by Collette, though it’s more pretentious and self-conscious. I just read two modern French novella’s that I think were deeply influenced by Sagan – by Violaine Huisman (The Book of Mother) and Christine Angot (An Impossible Love – and Incest) – they’re not nearly as good as Sagan BUT they have that addictive flavor and enduring taboo I’m drawn to. I prefer the female take to the unsubtle Bukowski/Sade/Burrows/Henry Miller – they’re just brutes without any subtlety. Anyway … really worth reading if you have the time. I’d say they all do moments and emotions ten thousand times better but yes, I am deeply influenced by that genre, though I don’t know what genre it is? Surely not magical realism nor memoir though I love Joan Didion too but in a different way. I think if Anne Sexton had written prose and been French she would have written like Sagan. Oh and all Sagan’s books are good not just that one. Maybe phantasmagoric erotica 😉 or confessional exposure? A la Plath if she hadn’t been such a narcissist. PS thank you because lately I have literally been one step from giving up and changing my name and running away so I so appreciate your encouragement it means – everything.

  8. You might be psychic. I woke up thinking about you – I must write you in a while with my thoughts on that – meanwhile that you would prop me up when I am feeling at my absolute most wretched, is a kindness I probably don’t deserve but I am most appreciative of it and you. You because I admire you deeply, and the kindness, because it’s lacking in this world. So scathing – the effort to keep going and writing when few read or care – I know you get it. I know you feel it. I hope neither of us give up but at the same time … I often ask why we do what we do when everything is so over-done. Maybe because what else would we do? I’m bad as growing things as you know? Although a rabbit sanctuary? I could do that. Oh I wish I were closer. PS thank you – thank you so much. I was just telling Susi that this was inspired slightly by my favorite writer By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart and Sunlight on Cold Water by Françoise Sagan. Nobody writes like that anymore. The nearest would be the modern authors Christine Angot and Violaine Huisman but neither are as good. I shall write you later this PM. Thank you starlight girl xo

  9. Definitely write to me!

    I know what you mean about everything overdone. It certainly feels that way to me too. Like we were born in the wrong era.

  10. Humans, ambivalent critters that we are, are often malcontent both with not knowing their destiny and with thinking they do know it. So many do crave fame, only to find if they get it that it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and the paparazzi are a pain in the ass. And in the Iliad, Achilles believes that only the glory of dying heroically in battle can have him remembered forever. I suspect that the happiest are those who just do what they do and let the future take care of itself.

  11. And just when I had whittled down my book stack(s), you’ve given me more! lol JK Thank you for the list, I will definitely check them out. And you are welcome, dear Candy! Keep writing! <3

  12. Just when I’ve gotten down my stack(s) of books, you give me new suggestions! JK lol 😉 I thank you, and will check them out. I like “confessional exposure” as that is how it feels. So maybe? And you’re welcome, dear Candy. I’m forever in your corner. <3

  13. I can’t add anything to what’s been said except the structure in which you’ve captured these visions is tremendous and I will never get enough of the world through your lens. And thank you for the reminder of Sagan, whom I haven’t read since high school. I have not yet read Un Peu de Soleil but the irony is the name I went by in high school French class was not Soleil but Tristesse, and I was in love with my teacher because every time she greeted me she knew she was evoking that book!

  14. We really are twins, Tristesse was one of my favorite characters. We really are TWINS.

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