This Mortal Marriage: Poems of Love, Lament and Praise

© 2003 by Alla Renée Bozarth

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Understanding, Mt. Hood, Presentation, and portions of Scars and What Wise Women Do Now, are available as framable art greeting cards among a series of Alla’s poems produced by Susan Lind-Kanne, artist and owner of Bear Blessing Soul Cards. To order Bear Blessings Soul Cards, log onto www.life-lines.us.

Front cover photograph taken by Sherrie Cole-Kalar.

Back cover photograph taken by John Jarman.

ISBN: 0-595-30036-7 (Pbk)

ISBN: 0-595-66120-3 (Cloth)

ISBN: 9-780-5957-5146-4 (ebook)

Contents

Acknowledgements

Prolegomenon

What is Poetry?"

Part One

There is No Such Thing as Safe Sex

Birth is a Movable Feast

The Short Form

Initiation Dream

Single Eye

Telling Time

Bad Sleep

Time Out

Putting it Simply—

Going All the Way

Has Anybody Here Read Thomas Aquinas?

My Liberal Education

Shingles on My Face

The Angel of My Illness

Resurrection Ritual

A Plea Against Imposed Thanaphobia

Spirit Eye—How God Speaks through My Face

For Another Day

Temple-tending

Handwriting on the Wall

The Artist

Pyroclastics

Phrenology

Love Poem to End

Too Much Woman (Says Goodbye)

Complications

Marrow

I Will Always Love You

Dragon Love

Eros in Shadows

Love Poem to a Man Who Claims a Castrated Intelligence

My Love Who Has Left

All or Nothing

The Croissant

Molting

Mt. Hood

Modern Times

Pilgrim’s Process

Cross-patterning

Kairos

Salmon Return

Home Coming

Volcano

Siege

Transformation

Cycle

No Answers Intended

Crystal

Deliverance

Passion Dance

Soul in the Womb of God

Flight into Opposites

Dive

Bleeding is an Involuntary Act

Goodbye Means God Be With You

Begging Bowl

Love Mantra for Letting Go

Recovery: Dissociation of Sensibility

Loving the Body

Twist of Fate

Transition

Chenonceau

Black Madonna—Notre Dame sur La Terre

Advent in Israel

Incongruity/Congruity

I Am Looking for You

My Lover’s Name for Me

In Memory of Us

Shekinah

After Dismembering

Continue Becoming the Person You Want to Be

Fifty Years After Holocaust

You Angels Who Cluster

Life Does

Are We In the Right Universe?

To My Friends Going to Visit Their Chiropractors This Week

Aging

Visiting the Old Folks’ Home

Away

Where Do They All, the Millions, Go to Die?

The Silk Tree

Worlds, My Love

Angst: Rite of Passage*

Trade

The Tomb of Lady Tashat

Beth’s Death

The Poet Who Saw Too Much: Anne Sexton

Two Sides of Suicide

Vitiator

Late Contingence

Necessity

Scars

Two Houses

Agony

Limenality

The Kinship of Suffering

The Pain of a Loverless Body

Depression

Susto

Chronic Illness: When Coping Wears Out

This Illness

Life Review

Reality—it’s a trick

Teal’s Question

When the Well Runs Dry

Recovery and Memory

Life Breaks All of Us to Let Us Become More

Prayer for Old Age

Sanctus

Consummation

Sea Call

Out from the Islands Off North Carolina

Belonging

Biodance

My Spiritual Practice

What Wise Women Do Now

Dance for Me When I Die

Journey

Equinox

Solstice

There is No Limit, or Pondicherry Pie*

Lady Christ

(The Bodies We Can’t Imagine and) What I Love Now

Free Fall

Sing Me Up

Wedding Dervish

Going to Heaven Like a Bee, Like a Fish, Like a Bird

Part Two

What Did You Learn?

On Receiving Poems from My Father

Blackout

Legacy

Desert Child

Our Father Died

Old Man, I Loved

Pirate’s Child

Resurrection

Touring

Padre es Muerto

Bone Cradle

Circle

All Souls’ Day

Found (Father) Poem

Gifts

Daughter-rite

Climacteric Lament

Persephone and I

After a Year, Only Bones

My Mother is a Dragon

To My Parents

Ancestors

Winter Rite

Stations

Midwives

Moonfire

It Begins

Loving Hands

Bring a Torch, Jeannette

As We Cross a Bridge of Dreams

Their Sapphire Wings

Shalom, Havere, Shalom Abba Rabin

More Words for William Stafford

After Seeing What the River Says

Shaking

To Thomas Merton

The Son

What Almost Happened—and The Habit of Miracles

Always Let Bells Ring

Going Back Into God

Firebird Regatta

Voyageur

Picture of Burntside Lake Found at Easter

Because it Means Separation

In the End When Life Begins Again and there is Only All and Now

Part Three

Time

To My Love, Gone After Fifteen Years

Beloved Come Lately

Life After Death

Euridyce

Orpheus

Yahrzeit

Silence

Soulmates

Widow

This Mortal Marriage

Carousel

Dear Yoko,

Enduring Friends

Cygnus X-1

Fallout

Antigone to Kali

Eternity Holds Time as Earth’s Atmosphere Holds the Woman Whose Womb Holds the Person Seed

Wedding Gifts

Aurora Dance

Telescope

Memory Tree

Resurrection Sequence

Christmas Resurrection

Something New has Happened, Something Aweful

Where are We Going?

Unafraid

Testimony

Healing Place

What Makes Me Cry

Awakening

Nesting Gifts

Find

El Greco, Athene, Medusa

Lost and Found

Fall Crocus

Isis, Spirit-keeper

Green Man

After the Fact…

As Soul Clings to Substance

Dolores

Suttee*

Men always wait for their wives

At Morning’s End

Christmas in Limbo

My Death

Fire

Imagine

Third Year

Destinies

Demand

Dancing Under Burning Stars

Easter Rites

Talking with My Hands

I, Solitary,

Uncle Yasha, or My Family History

Where Did You Go?

Angel Falls

Reincarnation

Chickadee Sacrament

Photography: Light-writing

Part Four

On the Feast of Joan of Arc

Lady of the Lake

For My Friend Nancy in Supraconsciousness After Cerebral Hemorrhage in May

After the Stroke

Three Friends

That Moment at Last

Pieta

Notes to an Unbeliever

Four Proofs of the Existence of God

Evolution/Resolution

The Middle

Why Me?

Well Being

Maya

Anytime, Anywhere

Claude Monet

The Union of Heaven and Earth

Early Winter Evening Walk

In the Presence of Elders

Changing Channels

Christmas Night

The True Meaning of Christmas and Everything Else

Rose Warrior

Presentation

Saints and Sinners

Truth is a Prism

Alchemy

My Favorite Alchemy or What to Do With the Wounds

How Alchemy Works

Making Gold

Garden of the Unsung Kaddish

How Dying Works

How I Live and Why

Morning Prayer for the New Millenium

Immanence/Transcendence

Dear Doctor,

Understanding

True Story of a Russian Orphan

What Next?

True Colors

My Summa Theologica

Summary

Sacred Sex

Twilight

Soulfire

Soulboat

Acknowledgements 

Some of the poems in This Mortal Marriage first appeared in the following books and audiotapes by Alla Renée Bozarth:

Books

The Book of Bliss

A Journey Through Grief

Accidental Wisdom

At the Foot of the Mountain

Life is Goodbye/Life is Hello: Grieving Well through All Kinds of Loss Lifelines

Love’s Prism

Six Days in St. Petersburg

Sparrow Songs—A Father-Daughter Poetry Collection

Stars in Your Bones: Emerging Signposts on our Spiritual Journeys (with Julia

Barkley and Terri Hawthorne)

The Book of Bliss

Womanpriest: A Personal Odyssey

Audiotapes

A Journey Through Grief

All Shall Be Well, All Shall Be One

Dance For Me When I Die

Reading Out Loud to God

Water Women

Prolegomenon 

Spirituality and sensuality united together make soul. And without one or the other, soul cannot exist. And because soul is eternal and incarnate, it carries sensual life beyond the realms of time, as it brings the infinite mystery of spirit into the realms of time, though we do not have any idea how all this happens.

Such is the miracle of marriage. It brings two lives, two depths together, and takes them beyond themselves. The marriage may end or break, but when it is true, its effects remain and continue.

So body goes its way in death and returns to earth, and spirit returns to the realms of light. But something of each goes with each still, making both sacred, and that is soul.

The mortal marriage is not just the one marked by commitment between lovers. I mean also the mysterious union between spirit and body, the joining of two energies and their spontaneous creation of a third, what we call Soul. When the lifelong union between spirit and body breaks, soul remains, takes off on its own, goes Somewhere. Goes somewhere Else. We can’t track it except by inklings, by imaginings, as parents track the child grown up and gone to Africa to work in the Peace Corps only by inklings drawn from vague descriptions in letters sent home, even though parents and child have until now spent a still-brief lifetime together. Everything has changed. Newness and distance prevail, though they serve to deepen love. Bonds become both frighteningly untenable and truly real. Soul is the lovechild of spirit and flesh that wanders out into the Unknown, and is—after all else goes—permanent, part and participant in a Larger Life than we can know until the going gets us there as well. It is to honor this mortal marriage that I write, and specifically to honor the deepening mystery into which I was drawn following my husband’s early death.

These poems, though not all about you, are for you, Phil, friend and lover, mate and brother—for you, who befriended my body and loved my soul, who befriended my spirit and worshipped my mortal flesh—you, who gave me childhood, who began as the playmate I never had and grew with me into a true soulmate; who had the courage to be true no matter what, to go the journey to the limit and then go beyond, to risk life to the full—you, who taught me to make commitment, to trust, to learn to be both truly happy and truly married. For these true graces, I thank you. Our marriage is always, for what new love has found me since your death confirms that the soul is not monogamous, and all true love and all time bonds are eternal.

Life takes time and Time takes life.

"Love as fully

as Life allows.

Live as fully

as Love allows."

From What Jesus Really said,

in The Book of Bliss

What is Poetry?" 

So it may be animal

tracks made by experienced

paws that have been

around

some, picked up sand

and soot from the burn-off

of city mornings

or forest fires, old

volcanic dust on obsidian

beaches.

Could be claw marks

scratching for soulfood—

Could be pure music, too,

to fit a dancing eye

or the ear of the heart,

just the notes themselves

that formed themselves

on the skins of trees

beaten down and pressed

to fit a human

creaturely hand.

I have no idea

what a poem is.

But I know it

has a voice

and makes a sound,

sometimes a creaturely cry

or moan, sometimes a song.

I know it is a joy

that expresses

nerve and bone.

Part One 

There is No Such Thing as Safe Sex 

Sex is the absolute

possible joy of being

a creature—sometimes

breathtaking bliss,

an ecstatic epiphany,

or a simple high moment

of life.

And sometimes

sex is just

a damn nuisance.

Nevermind that

it can ruin lives,

complicate friendships,

take down nations,

lead to war and worse—

create complete catastrophe.

You never know

where it may lead—

new worlds or

dead ends.

It can make men’s brains

migrate below their belts

or into their fists

and women forget

they had a life plan.

Sometimes an hour’s pleasure

leads to lasting treasure.

Sometimes to sickness and death.

Still, when I feel the old rumble

in my blood and come a little

more alive, I surrender

to the primal call along with the best,

in theory if not practice.

After all, it was good enough

for my Mama, and I guess

I’m more or less proof

it can be worth the trouble.

Birth is a Movable Feast 

White is the worst,

said the midwife.

"Blue and purple are bad

but white means a long time

without oxygen."

I was taken up by alien hands

on Ascension Day, May 15, 1947;

I was denied the long descent

down the birth canal, the first

necessary transit.

Picked like an onion

coiled in the womb

at a time not mine.

No cry. No natural struggle

to be born.

I believe I should have liked

to sleep a bit longer and would

have leapt up singing

later in the day.

So. This primal loss,

the grief of a lifetime,

the quest: to be born.

Again and again I struggle

to finish the fear, to swim

into the future, to remember

how it’s supposed to be done.

Give me my birthright!

Every day is a happy birthday,

deathday, something-new-to-discover

day. Don’t do it for me!

It’s my fight, my rite.

In poems, in love, in work:

I will be midwife and mother,

will be the beloved other, urging.

I will strike, shout, inhale

all life in one swallow,

will sneeze eyeswide, let out

the full blast of delight

in at last achieving delivery.

My hands, blood-covered

in their eager love, croon on:

it’s never too late to be born.

The Short Form 

My life—or Why I have

fibromyalgia.

I was conceived on Mariposa Street

across from the Biltmore Hotel in

downtown Los Angeles.

Papa told me this for shock effect

when I was in my thirties

and apparently low on entertainment.

I had my beginning in the name

of the butterfly—Psyche’s emblem

of death and resurrection.

After awhile, things changed.

My parents said goodbye to Hollywood

and went north. Papa worked nights

on live radio. Mama listened

while she cooked (and cooked me).

They dined at 2a.m.

and went to bed at dawn,

never up before the crack of noon.

Mama’s doctor said, "I’ll take out

your baby at eight Thursday morning,"

as if I were a tooth to