SageGreenJournal.org
voices out of the West, mostly poetry, personal to planetary
Joan Logghe
Española, New Mezico
Joan's web site is
photo by Piper Leigh
Two Poems by Joan Logghe
Rather
There were birds (bards) lifting
from the saltbush (settlement) like crazy
There was a magpie, was she between
the leaf (hedge) and the fence (window)
There was a night blooming cereus that bloomed twice
and twice, even trying, I missed its opening.
There were a dozen chores and I wanted to do them all at once
There was a birthday on the doorstep and I staggered over it.
There was Thursday in the old house
and they made the word threshold
There were new words in the Oxford English Dictionary,
staycation, ginornmous, frenemy
There were so many beauties (beatniks) falling off your face
There were enough deaths in Haiti (helacious) so we forgot Pakistan
There were people (alligators) who went back to New Orleans
There was your face (your heart) with your eyes closed,
the way you smile best
There was your face for forty years.
There were other faces and after
a death which face remains.
There were clues (crumbs)
and there were giveaways
There was water running
through my body (arroyo).
Summer 2010
Unpunctuated Awe
for WS Merwin
So beautiful today
I don’t know what to do with it
I can’t be outside it’s too perfect
the morning glories are too too without
even ingesting their known iota of trip
The Maximillian sunflowers are poised
to bloom and even that potential is wildly
enticing into too beautiful The dues we paid
After the fires after the wind and smoke the terrible
canyon fires of Santa Clara watershed tears shed
I could cry again today for the world we earned
paid its dues to too beautiful too beautiful
beautiful datura beautiful the Jewish New Year
I am already lamenting I stand naked for an hour
in my greenhouse watching the cereus flower
prepare for night blooming I stand naked before
my shower and after my shower another phone call
from the too beautiful I talk naked on the phone
because I don’t know how to manage today
with how I love too beautiful the note in the mail
from you how I love poets and painters who make
the world shine me I never want to set foot
inside a classroom with no windows
I want to speak poetry to those finches
and to the kale I will tell the kale I forgive the aphids
you are so greenly beautiful I love my body today
because it is the vessel that carried too beautiful
soon departing for other beauty don’t mention
it you say but in the too beautiful death
is already sharpening its scythe on too beautiful
its harvest of basil scent a mint too many
tomatoes and a glut of cucumbers and I forget
that I know how to preserve I am doing it now
Published in Odes & Offerings, anthology from Sunstone Press