Don’t ever think of human beings you love
      And need as like those shifting shimmerings,
      No matter how liquescent memorable enduring
      Against the immortal darkness of the sky.
      The northern lights will break a heart and heal it
      In the same motion, raveling and unraveling.

Mark Jarman remains one of the most influential poets for me — both as a writer and reader of poetry. I came across his Questions of Ecclesiastes, and then Unholy Sonnets, during a period where I was searching for some kind of spirituality. The son of a preacher, Jarman’s need to understand divinity took a much more Christian angle than my own, much less agnostic, but his longing was the same that drove me to read the Bible cover to cover, then the Koran, then the Mahabharata, looking for something that might make sense.

This week’s poem, I think, is written from the same place as that earlier work–that desire to grasp the ungraspable, the futility of it, and then beneath even that, the quiet shame of remaining unsatisfied by belief alone. Over and over in his poems, Jarman turns these concepts like small stones in his hand, probing the cracks for clues to what’s inside. Some poets write to express, but Jarman writes to explore, and that’s what always draws me to his work.

In this piece the overarching metaphor couldn’t be more perfect, even if he cautions against it–a great marriage as those magical, dancing, elusive lights.