Closer: Poems of a Deepning Love
There is a difference between falling in love and moving deeper into it. The first happens to you. The second is something you choose — every day, in every ordinary and extraordinary moment, with full awareness of what you are choosing and why.
This collection is about the second kind.
I have written here about what I see and hear and touch and taste and smell. I have written about laughter and time and the particular way she speaks my name. I have written about the moment I saw myself reflected in her and the moment I understood that our individual colors were blending into something neither of us could have made alone. I have written about a getaway planned together and a song that belongs to no one but us.
These are not grand declarations. They are close observations — a man paying full and devoted attention to a woman who deserves nothing less.
To move closer to Priya is to move closer to the life I was made to live. I am not finished discovering her. I do not expect to be. That is not a concern. That is the gift.
Closer: Poems of a Deepening Love is a collection of ten poems tracing the ongoing discovery of a love already found. Where Scott’s first collection, A Sacred Journey: From Longing to Wholeness, told the story of a love sought, prepared for, and gratefully received, this collection moves deeper into the daily, sensory, and spiritual experience of two people becoming more fully known to each other with every passing day.
The collection opens with anticipation — a getaway planned, time together measured and valued — and moves through the full landscape of intimate attention. Each of the five senses receives its own devoted exploration, from the sound of a name spoken in a particular voice, to the sight of a beloved turning her gaze, to the touch of a hand or the brush of fingers in hair, to the taste of a kiss like honey, to the scent that arrives before she enters and lingers after she leaves. Woven through this sensory portrait are poems of emotional depth, shared laughter, philosophical reflection, and the theological conviction that this love is not accidental but precisely designed.
The collection closes where every deepening love must ultimately arrive — at the recognition that two people have become something together that neither was alone. My lyrics, your music, our song.
Written for Priya, with full attention and a full heart.
These poems were written in the act of paying attention.
Priya is a woman who reveals herself gradually and completely — in the sound of her laugh, in the way she turns her gaze, in the particular combination of her hair and soap and lotion that arrives before she does and stays after she leaves. She is not a woman who announces herself. She is a woman who is discovered. These poems are the record of that discovery in progress.
I am a man who has learned, sometimes slowly and sometimes at great cost, that the most important things in life are found not by searching harder but by paying closer attention to what is already present. Priya has taught me this more completely than anyone. Every poem in this collection began with an observation — something I noticed, something I felt, something I could not stop thinking about until I had found language adequate to it. That is how she works on me. Quietly, completely, without effort or design.
I want to say something about the sensory poems in this collection — the poems devoted to each of the five senses in turn. I did not plan that architecture. It arrived naturally, one poem at a time, because Priya is present to me in every dimension of perception simultaneously. She is not an idea I love. She is a person I experience completely — with my eyes, my ears, my hands, my lips, my nose, my memory, and whatever the deepest part of me is called that receives another person and recognizes them as home.
This collection does not conclude the story. It records a moment in the middle of it — two people closer than they were, moving closer still, precisely designed for exactly this.
Scott