Poets’ Corner: Valentine’s Day, Art Goodtimes

12 Feb Poets’ Corner: Valentine’s Day, Art Goodtimes

Soon it will be Valentine’s Day, stirring up hot-blooded passions at a cold-blooded time of year. Asked to send along bon mots (to go along with bon bons) for the holiday), Art Goodtimes’ words suggest love is not always a many splendored thing – or, it is all too splendid, so it’s loss or absence is a gut punch. And please note, Art is one of two featured poets – the other is Wordwoman Rosemerry Trommer – at the February Talking Gourds gathering, in Telluride on February 21 at Telluride Arts’ HQ.

Art Goodtimes photographed by Rebecca Fyffe, 2014 Mushroom Festival director

half a cup

call them love stories

blew his brains out in the shed

left alone in their trailer’s bed

late lovers, his pump seized up

six months after the wedding

broke her heart, lungs choked

four lives lost in the found

each breath a valentine lottery

each stub end lucky, or not

Pre-Valentine, Post Loss

-for mf

Shivering in the yurt

I’ve turned into your shrine

I sing a death song

Hide the roof-leak pot

& tidy up the altars

with appropriate reverence

Moving relics around

your rose-etched urn

pillow hearts & Turkish rugs

Already starting to forget

the giggles that could tramp-P

oline into laughter

Uncurling

-Valentine’s, 1991

Ah-haa!

Dawn breaks over Lone Cone

Romance is a pissed-off cop with his club raised

Venus. Orion. The Pleides

“Mercy, mercy”

What’s mysterious & sexy & siren calls us all

to its sweet womb is the earth herself

“Hosanna, madonna”

Curling up into the fetal crawl

back to the Mother’s bed

I wake up all over again

Lionceau de Coeur

coming off a 2,000 year jealousy drunk

free to flex & unflex, mate & unmate

all bunched up & spiraling

like stratocumulus up from the Southwest

the wind’s kachinas on a rampage

Sun punching through from above &

a fan of light over the Uncompahgre

reveals the tao of migrating geese

in flight