"The Day Can Become..."

This is the poem which Santa Fe's Poet Laureate, Arthur Sze, read at the grand opening of Southside Library, and whose last lines are inscribed into the glass of the clerestory windows. We lost the text on our desk for a while, but here it is: (thank you, Arthur)

   The Day Can Become A Zen Garden of Raked Sand

The day can become a Zen garden of raked sand
or a yellow tanager singing on a branch;

feel the terrors and pleasures of the morning:
in Tianjin all the foreigners are sent to a movie

and they must guess at what the authorities
do not wish them to see; dream a rainy landscape:

the Jemez Mountains breaking up in mist and jagged light
into a series of smaller but dazzling ranges;

to distinguish the smell of calendula from delphinium
is of no apparent consequence, but guess that

crucial moments in history involve an unobtrusive
point flaring into a startling revelation;

now be alive to the flowering chives by the window;
feel the potato plant in the whiskey barrel soak up sun;

feel this riparian light,
this flow where no word no water is.