"We used to be close" is a confession that the story is already over, and the poem spends its short length working out who or what to blame. Its answer is that nobody is to blame, which makes the loss harder to bear. The central idea is that people can be separated without any quarrel, simply by the slow forces of time and distance, yet the bond between family members outlasts the separation.
The speaker starts by clearing both people of guilt: "It was not me who ended it, / Nor you." The culprits turn out to be abstractions, "time, / And space," and the poem becomes interesting where the speaker struggles to pin them down. "Or the fact that space, / In fact, / Had pushed us apart" stumbles as it goes. The "Or" revises what came before, and "In fact" claims a certainty the sentence doesn't have. It sounds like someone who has told themselves this explanation many times and is still not convinced by it.
The strongest image arrives in the middle: "The hands of the clock, / Gripping our very souls." The clock's hands are also human hands, so time stops being an idea and becomes a captor with a physical grip. The verbs get steadily more violent, from "pushed" to "pulling" to "Dragging you away." The person being taken is passive, which fits the opening claim that neither of them chose this. Then the speaker answers with effort: "Stronger than I could pull, / Faster than I could run." The parallel lines turn the loss into a tug-of-war and then a chase, and both are lost. These comparatives also echo the title. "closer" is itself a comparative, the one thing the speaker can no longer be. The lowercase title can also be read as "one who closes," with time as the closer that ends things, though that is an interpretation rather than something the poem states.
The poem's form copies its subject. It is a single sentence broken into short lines, with a comma at the end of almost every line and one full stop at the very end. Nothing pauses properly, so the sentence is dragged along just as the speaker was. There is no regular rhyme. "Did" and "said" faintly chime near the start, but the real music comes from repetition. "Apart" comes back three times and "space" keeps returning, like a drumbeat that replaces rhyme. The rhythm is halting at first, with fragments such as "We did," and "They said," that sound like asides spoken across a table. It gathers speed in the pull-and-run lines, then drops to the single word "But," which acts as a hinge. After it the poem turns from what happened to what endured.
The poem also holds back its most important word. "Like two peas in a pod" is a worn-out phrase, and the speaker attributes it to others ("They said"), as if keeping a polite distance from it. A pod is a kind of shared home, though, and the last line makes the link: "No one forgets their family." Only now do we learn what kind of closeness this was. The poem never says who "you" is or what exactly separated them, whether a move, a drift or something more final. That vagueness lets readers fill the gap with their own experience.
The ending is flat and general, a statement of fact rather than a flourish, and that plainness is where the feeling comes from. "You see" turns to the listener as if asking to be believed. Judging by the insistence, the line could be a comfort or a defence, since someone who has to say that no one forgets may be afraid of being forgotten.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It uses everyday speech and one extended image of the clock to say something true about losing touch. It doesn't pretend the speaker won the struggle. It admits the other person was stronger and faster, and then claims the one thing time could not take, which is memory. For readers who have grown up, moved away or drifted from someone they loved, that claim feels both modest and large.