Truro, 1961

Miriam Sagan

A canal cut to create

peninsula, a bridge suspended

above salt water, mystic and bitter.

It’s not that difficult

to be two places at once.

In the overheated

elementary school classroom

my mind wanders to walk

the path to the beach,

bare feet know every

twisted root and cool

patch of sand.

Tides make strange

estuarial passageways,

flood plains and rivulets

beneath the highest dunes of

Fox’s Bottom.

Tide running out

in moonlight.

An enormous clam shell

half the size of the universe

sits wet, glistening, and open.

AUTHOR BIO

Miriam Sagan is the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction, and memoir. She is a two-time winner of the New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards as well as a recipient of the City of Santa Fe Mayor's Award for Excellence in the Arts and a New Mexico Literary Arts Gratitude Award. She has been a writer in residence in four national parks, Yaddo, MacDowell, Gullkistan in Iceland, Kura Studio in Japan, and a dozen more remote and interesting places. She works with text and sculptural installation as part of the mother/daughter creative team Maternal Mitochondria (with Isabel Winson-Sagan) in venues ranging from RV parks to galleries. She founded and directed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement. Her poetry was set to music for the Santa Fe Women's Chorus, incised on stoneware for two haiku pathways, and projected as video inside an abandoned building during the pandemic under the auspices of Vital Spaces.