Rag Trade
La Alameda Press, 2004
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From Amazon.com: One of New Mexico’s finest contemporary poets, Miriam Sagan has consistently explored emotional clarity and compassion within life’s myriad interactions. In her new book, Rag Trade, she presents poems of borders—between nations and cultures, in history and the imagination. Crossing borders braids lives. Fabric serves as metaphor throughout these poems, whether the ikats of the Silk Road, prayer flags of Tibet, Rio Grande rug weaving, the garment industry of New Jersey, or Jewish ritual coverings. War, travel, immigration, and trade bring together people and ideas that don’t necessarily belong together but which lead to new connections and social dynamics.

Rag Trade also includes poems on women artists, such as Southwestern architect Mary Jane Colter and the painter Emily Carr, which reveal the unforeseen but entwining influences on personal history.

Excerpts:

When I was a child
When we took the Superchief in the snow
When I first caught a glimpse
of what I would desire--
Ladder leading to an opening
In roof, or wall,
The imagined West.
--from "Homage to Mary Coulter"

The Weaver's Line

"My name is Manuelito Lovato"

That's what it says on the tag
of the small woven rug
I bought in Los Ojos,
a place that implies water.

"I was born in Coyote, New Mexico"

Not far from Tierra Amarilla
passing the billboard that says in Spanish
"Land or Death", and knowing it's not that easy
Most of us have neither.

"Seventeen years later I married"

The dark blue rug with a red zigzag
Shaped like a mountain or an electrocardiogram
Or a blue woolen sky
Split by lightning.

"The weaver is dead"

That is what the cashier said
When I took the rug to the counter
Prepared to pay
My hard earned hundred dollars

"She got the cancer and died"

No more small blue rugs from this loom
Blue of chicory and Abiquiu dam under rain
Red of a heart line
Or something remembered

"I was born in 1934"

She started weaving at the age of forty-nine
Her eleven year old grandson taught her
But what taught her to weave like that
That bold red thread on blue wool?

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