Our Life — Blackbird Archive

← v21n1, Spring 2022

Our life is daily happiness together

and nightly sleep or restlessness

and knowing that the other is

awake or dreaming.

All that follows with the sun

or happens in the phases of the moon

or draws its meaning from the zodiac

is part of it—

The all of larger all’s and smaller ones,

the borders that are drawn, made like a bed,

set like a table, the loving views,

close or from a distance.

We have our daily life, our only life,

but close as we can make ourselves

there has to be at least a little distance

we can cross.

marriage love time

Mark Jarman

Mark Jarman is the author of eleven collections of poetry, most recently The Heronry (Sarabande Books, 2017), and two books of essays on poetry, Body and Soul: Essays on Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2002) and The Secret of Poetry (Story Line Press, 2001). He is the recipient of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Poets’ Prize, the Joseph Henry Jackson Award for poetry, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, among others. Jarman is the Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Photo by Lauren Urquhart