On April 13, 2011 Mayor David Coss proclaimed National Poetry Month for the month of April in Santa Fe. Joan Logghe composed "April in Santa" for the occasion and read it at the meeting.

This is the city for poets. You’d think, Paris,
but I say here, just inside the library door
where magazines wait to be recycled into new
hands, where in the stacks the poets snuggle up

against one another, paperback by hard
cover, living by dead, they hum between
themselves, they speak in a frequency
heard only by readers.

And on the Plaza the poems wait
to be written down. They are suspended
in the air, a hacky sack flying from foot
to foot, a man looking down from a balcony,

a cash register tallying up the tax on a strand
of jewelry, liquid silver and jet. And the paintings
on the walls of the museums, or sculpture in gardens
just words away from saved and savored.

How this city is held afloat by art astounds
my lovely Wisconsin relatives held intact by
milk and road repair. They are driving off
with turquoise stud earrings for the grand daughters.

The birds bank and cycle above their rented car
and I am left here, my pen filled with ink
to immortalize which means don’t let this moment die.
City of poems, City of poets,

archiving the spring air, tracing the holy
pollen count which after all makes sacred seed of tree.
The birdsong of Thursday, the vibrations left in the
wake of artists who gather like iron filings

around this magnet of place. The ticket holders, the tourists,
the local girl who never went to a museum
before and now, skipping through bird and tulip,
it’s her poem.

A little no capital letters e.e. cummings of a boy,
a large fat-lady-singing of a woman and this Opera is not over,
It keeps singing Spring, spring, spring and in Sena Plaza
the waiters can’t help but burst Broadway

over the crowns of poppy waiting for their clock
of scarlet to tick open. On the Plaza my friend Sunny
selling glass earrings and barrettes. Have you noticed,
I mean how can you help but notice?

How many generations of souls from Santo Domingo
or Santa Clara, sat under the portal through years and winters
for the arrival of April, in this holy city where April
is never cruel, though windy and more than deep.

Saint Francis making us all into instruments of His Peace.
Poets accumulate to jot down the aha of place,
the jolt of jonquil, white bark of aspen, nuance
of sunset on the Cathedral.

Any place can be Paris, my old teacher said.
And in the library, I check out books, the delicate
arm of the librarian tattooed with apple blossoms.

Joan Logghe © 2011

Corpses push up through thawing permafrost,

as I scrape salmon skin off a pan at the sink;
on the porch, motes in slanting yellow light

undulate in air. Is Venus at dusk as luminous
as Venus at dawn? Yesterday I was about to

seal a borax capsule angled up from the bottom

of a decaying exterior jamb when I glimpsed
jagged ice floating in a bay. Naval sonar

slices through whales, even as a portion
of male dorsal fin is served to the captain

of an umiak. Stopped in traffic, he swings from

a chairlift, gazes down at scarlet paintbrush.
Moistening an envelope before sealing it,

I recall the slight noise you made when I
grazed your shoulder. When a frost wiped out

the chalk-blue flowering plant by the door,

I watered until it revived from the roots.
The song of a knife sharpener in an alley

passes through the mind of a microbiologist
before he undergoes anesthesia for surgery.

The first night of autumn has singed

bell peppers by the fence, while budding
chamisa stalks in the courtyard bend to ground.

Observing people conversing at a nearby table,
he surmises this moment is the convergence

and divergence of lines passing through a point.

The wisteria along the porch has never bloomed;
a praying mantis on the wood floor sips water

from a dog bowl. Laughter from upstairs echoes
downstairs as teenage girls compare bra sizes.

An ex-army officer turned critic frets

over the composition of a search committee,
snickers and disparages rival candidates.

A welder, who turns away for a few seconds
to gaze at the Sangre de Cristos, detects a line

of trucks backed up on an international overpass

where exhaust spews onto houses below.
The day may be called One Toothroad or Six Thunderpain,

but a Mayan naming of a day will not transform it,
nor will the mathematics of time halt.

An imprint of ginkgo leaf--fan-shaped, slightly

thickened, slightly wavy on broad edge, two-
lobed, with forking parallel veins but no

midvein--in a slab of coal is momentary beauty,
while ginkgos along a street dropping gold

leaves are mindless beauty of the quotidian.

Once thought to be extinct, the ginkgo was
discovered in Himalayan monasteries and

propagated back into the world. Although I
cannot save a grasshopper singed by frost

trying to warm itself in sunlight on a walkway,

I ponder shadows of budding pink and orange
bougainvilleas on a wall. As masons level sand,

lay bricks in horizontal then vertical pairs,
we construct a ground to render a space

our own. As light from a partial lunar eclipse

diffuses down skylight walls, we rock and
sluice, rock and sluice, fingertips fanned

to fanned fingertips, debouch into plentitude.
Venus vanishes in a brightening sky: how long

does a diamond ring of a solar eclipse persist?

You did not have to fly to Zimbabwe in June 2001
to experience it. The day recalls Thirteen Death

and One Deer when an end slips into a beginning.
I recall mating butterflies with red dots on wings,

the bow of a long liner thudding on waves,

crescendo of water beginning to boil in a kettle,
cries of humpback whales. In silence dancers

concentrate on movements on stage; lilacs bud
by a gate. As bits of consciousness constellate,

I rouse to a 3 a.m. December rain on the skylight.

A woman sweeps glass shards in a driveway,
oblivious to elm branches reflected on windshields

of passing cars. Juniper crackles in the fireplace;
whale flukes break the water as it dives.

The path of totality is not marked by

a shadow hurtling across the earth’s surface
at three thousand kilometers per hour,

but by our eyelashes attuned to each other.
At the mouth of an arroyo, a lamb skull

and ribcage bleach in the sand; tufts of fleece

caught on barbed wire have vanished.
The Shang carved characters in the skulls

of their enemies, but what transpired here?
You do not need to steep turtle shells

in blood to prognosticate clouds. Someone

dumps a refrigerator upstream in the riverbed
while you admire the yellow blossoms of

a golden rain tree. A woman weeds, sniffs
fragrance from a line of onions in her garden;

you scramble an egg, sip oolong tea.

© Arthur Sze