Poetry: Although You Felt So Close, (Within Splashes) by Adrian Cepeda
Breathless and rolling, “Although You Felt So Close, (Within Splashes)” presses with momentum at every line. The poem lands at a breakneck intimacy that’s surprising and comfortable, and Adrian Cepeda carries his reader with fluid motion, puts their feet on the shore to feel the tickle of the tide. You can view the painting that inspired this bit of ekphrasis at the bottom of the page.
Although You Felt So Close, (Within Splashes)
“The hottest love has the coldest end.”
― Socrates
How we seemed so small
as this blue downward
tide splashed our trembling
bodies lying to the sea
trying to recreate Lancaster
and Kerr on the beach,
but all I tasted the naked
salt// and even feeling
with your eyes closed,
rolling fault, dripping my blame
for the sand sticking
to your most private spaces//
even here dripping skinny
feeling smaller, on Port Aransas beach
although you felt so close,
one last time, I just remember
the shivering waves
and the coldest
goosebumps all over
your skin, awaken me
with the bluest echoes, fading
out of strings,
through disharmonic lips,
like Morse code signaling—
from this our final low
tide symphony// here
we lay like dissonant strangers
afraid of the letting go
seeing the surging blue
taking you further away
feeling so far to hear us
waves straying, breathlessly
from our eternity.
(From oil on canvas Blue Downward Tide by Taf Wallet Belgian)
Adrian Cepeda
Adrian Ernesto Cepeda is an LA Poet who is a recent graduate of MFA program at Antioch University in Los Angeles where he lives with his wife and their cat Woody Gold. His poetry has been featured in The Yellow Chair Review, Thick With Conviction, Silver Birch Press and one of his poems was named the winner of Subterranean Blue Poetry’s 2016 "The Children of Orpheus" Anthology/Contest.
