Inadvertent Altar
La Alameda Press, Albuquerque, 2000
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Miriam Sagan’s poetry is forced by urgency; memory and awareness rise to the surface in gasps, fragments, and fleeting observations. Affirmations are reached with difficulty—grudging, yes, but true to the times . . .The poems observe passing moments in passionate detail without trying to explain them or make sense of them. The poems know that much is beyond explanation; they recognize that only the individual can find coherence, and even then only briefly, in the flux of events, and never with absolute certainty. But to feel the impact of the passing moments, that is another matter: to be truly alive is to sense to the depths of one’s being the impact of what we call “ordinary,” whether joyous or painful, or whatever comes in-between. There are moments in Miriam Sagan’s poems approaching despair and yet there remains always the possibility of ecstatic illumination, even in—or perhaps, especially in—the most common observations. — R.W. French

Excerpts:

Something about this photograph
Might be French--the middle-aged couple
Ecstatic, the young bride
Squinting into the sun
That punctuates two rain showers
Which frame the ceremony between green cottonwoods.
--from "I Look at You"

Library
Standing in the stacks of Widener Library
For the first time, I could have found
The Federalist Papers in Urdu
If I'd looked hard enough
Narrow space between the shelves, beneath a catwalk
Scholars walked over my head, or graduate
Students hugging tight cold Cambridge streets
Avoiding deportation to some terrible regime back home.

Level A, B, C
Translucent floors are other ceilings
Down at the bottom, books
In languages obscure by the time
Alexandria burned
What Scythians spoke, or Assyrians
Down here, I'm seized
Not by a desire for knowledge
But by desire
Surrounded by the smell of paper
Pages curling upward, I want to make love
To anyone, myself, some old boyfriend
Or current one
For I'm alone.

I told this story
Twenty-five years later
To a Buddhist scholar, who said:
"Oh yes, that's bodhichitta,
The thought of enlightenment."
A nexus point
In a diamond web.
I'd always thought
Bodhichitta was the smell
Of the incense stick
At the funeral
Some wake up to impermanence
Not this lovely sensation
Of too much to read.

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