Six inches is hardly a distance at all, yet Jerry Kraft's «Last Moments» opens with a request to shrink it. "Closer," says the person on the other pillow, speaking "from less / Than six inches away." The scene is a bedroom at the end of an ordinary day, two people lying face to face and talking quietly before sleep. Nothing happens in the usual sense of a plot. The poem's interest lies in how much it finds in something so small. Its central idea is that real intimacy is built less from grand gestures than from easy, unhurried talk in the half-dark.
The speaker is careful about what kind of talk this is. The voices are "soft," and the topics are "sometimes / Important, often just touching." That last phrase cuts two ways: conversation that merely touches on a subject, and conversation that is itself a form of touch. What is said matters less than the fact of saying it. Even the single line of dialogue the speaker offers, "Are you thinking of a date?", is practical and almost throwaway. We never learn which date, and the vagueness seems deliberate. The question matters because of how easily it is asked and answered. What follows is the poem's quiet payoff: "no clouds rise up, no / Silences contained." Nothing tense is brewing, and no awkward pause has to be held in.
The form copies this ease. There is no regular meter and no end rhyme, and sentences spill over the line breaks so steadily that the poem reads like one long murmured breath. Several breaks do small, precise jobs. "from less" ends its line before "Than six inches away" arrives, so the gap seems to narrow as we read. "Face / Each other" is split apart, then repeated whole as "Face each other," as if the pillow-to-pillow distance were closing on the page. "Before sleep, before love, before" stacks three thresholds, and the last "before" dangles at the line's end, leaving a beat of suspense until the fear is named: "Anything that matters gets away."
That fear is the only shadow in the poem. Judging by the title, "Last Moments" most obviously means the last moments of the day, yet the phrase also carries a hint of finality that the poem never states. The speaker calls these "the best rare moments," an odd order of words that suggests such closeness is precious because the rest of the day crowds it out. The poem enjoys the quiet while sensing that it cannot be kept.
Sound does much of the work. Although the poem doesn't rhyme in the usual way, a long "ay" hums through it: *day*, *away*, *say*, *away*, *date*, *wait*, *way*, *delay*. These words sit mid-line as often as at line ends, so the echo feels like a recurring murmur rather than a planned pattern. "Rest" and "best" sit side by side, and the soft s-sounds of "soft voices / In sounds sleeping gray" blur into a hush. "Gray" is not gloomy here. It is the colour of dusk and drowsiness, and the phrase makes the sounds themselves seem to be dozing off.
The ending returns to the opening: "Closer" you say. The words are the same, but we now hear them differently. At first the request seems almost a correction, an adjustment to the distance. After the poem's slow accumulation of detail, it sounds like an invitation that the speaker meets as "Easy as breathing," "neither hurry / Nor delay." The line break after "hurry" even gives the next phrase a small pause to settle into.
The poem is significant because it takes the opposite route from the dramatic love poem. It stays at six inches, among pillows and half-finished topics, and shows that tenderness lives in the ordinary. It also notices a paradox: two people already as near as they can be still want to be nearer, so closeness is never finished. The loved one's voice begins and ends the poem, and the speaker's own is heard only once, which suggests a speaker who listens more than he talks. That seems a fitting way to write about being truly at ease with someone.