9/6/2016 Three Poems by Miriam SaganBlueprint what does it mean to replicate anything tumbleweed blown across the two-lane highway seems momentarily as big as the Toyota might hit the car or be snapped by the mind’s eye like a corneal afterimage some feeling too seems to repeat everywhere or narrative-- his story of the nearsighted confrontation with the big-eyed octopus off the pier at Key West that even hungry he couldn’t kill cyanotype of something inside me ribs, dancing vertebra (a tiny skeleton? a tiny self?) sun bakes an image-- button, handprint bones of a fish owl wing-- in childhood something forgotten but what? memory silvered mirror’s reflection or the shadow you cast growing longer and longer at dusk above the hopscotch board chalked on asphalt the labyrinth between here and paradise… A Proper Noun Dead Lake might be its name or deterioration-- a sign regulates fishing While Sushan with its covered bridge is only a few miles away unlike the walled city of Persia where Queen Ester covered her head and Vashti danced naked waterlilies floating on the water’s surface in July in upstate New York don’t realize they reference Monet’s cataract clouded vision whether they want to or not it’s the word “threshold” I’m after, misspelling it at first as I so often do until I realize I cannot go through this door without it If I Read The Makioka Sisters for the third time I will live forever, after all, it worked the second time when I was nine months pregnant convinced I'd die in childbirth but for no discernible reason, here in the first world courtyard with large pink roses and a stow fountain drawing bees brahms trio rehearsal in the museum auditorium, to write for clarinet is to invite your death-- it happened to mozart, why not brahms who was about our age when he wrote this, art deco murals in every white walled niche-- the cross higher than the aztec staff, the cello is lovely i’m itching mildly from morphine, strings, keys, mouthpiece a piano could be a giant cello turned on its back like a coracle, or a coffin or breached whale, breached birth ![]() Bio: Miriam Sagan is the author of 30 published books, including the novel Black Rainbow (Sherman Asher, 2015) and Geographic: A Memoir of Time and Space (Casa de Snapdragon, 2016). She founded and heads the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College. Her blog Miriam’s Well (http://miriamswell.wordpress.com) has a thousand daily readers. She has been a writer in residence in two national parks, at Yaddo, MacDowell, Colorado Art Ranch, Andrew’s Experimental Forest, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Iceland’s Gullkistan Residency for creative people, and another dozen or so remote and unique places. Her awards include the Santa Fe Mayor’s award for Excellence in the Arts, the Poetry Gratitude Award from New Mexico Literary Arts, and A Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa. 9/6/2016 07:49:23 pm
Congratulations Miriam,it is always a pleasure to read your work,love and light,angelee
Devon Miller-Duggan
9/6/2016 08:13:14 pm
Oh, I love these. Comments are closed.
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