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Pagan CanticleUnclap your millennial gates
The checkmate age of the sky
Just because the Bible
Enough of palace doors,
The orchard opens up its stores:
Each kami Kali spiderqueen
Not caught in the web but dancing
on high: holy holy holy.
mud of the mystery.
& the yet unmade.
shines
where life springs full-blown
another incantation, sucking
A previous version was published in the Telluride Magazine. Copyright 2006 by Art Goodtimes
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Art writes:
I started this George Oppen-influenced poem in the Cloud Acre john. As the Telegraph Ave. bubble bardess Julia Vinograd used to say, "I write some of my best poetry with my pants down." It's a response to the first stanza of a wonderful lyric paean to the Pacific Rim by William Everson (aka Brother Antoninus). His "Canticle to the Waterbirds" begins with the marvelously cacophonous onomatopoeia: "Clack your beaks you cormorants and kittiwakes." His language is striking, alliterative, rooted in the earth. And epiphanal. But while Everson's canticle has a Christian theme, I offer this pagan canticle, understanding that paganus is the Latin word for “county person.”
Poet, journalist, and third-term Green County Commissioner, Art Goodtimes is a former poetry editor for Earth First! Journal and Wild Earth. He served as poet-in-residence for the annual Telluride Mushroom Festival for twenty-five years, and continues as founder/director of the annual Talking Gourds poetry gatherings. Art's new poetry book, As If the World Really Mattered (La Alameda Press, distributed by the University of New Mexico Press), will be out in December 2006. Art can be reached via email at: cloudacre@norwoodcolorado.us.
