David’s Camera, Stolen in San Francisco
18 Monday Jun 2012
Posted in Gatherings, Grief, Uncategorized
Category Archives: Grief
Leaving 45-213 Puali Koa Place
26 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted in Grief, Marriage, Seasons, Weekend Weather Chapbook
Kaneohe, Hawaii
Like the hand of a shy lover, the fragrance of gardenias
has a touch too gentle to brush away.
Ruffled by the trade winds, curtain shadows begin to dance
in the sunlight of this emptied bedroom.
When May is gone the white bodies of gardenias will turn brown.
Their petals will drop like dresses slipped out of and abandoned.
Leaves in Fall
26 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted in Grief, Seasons, Weekend Weather Chapbook
Cedar Lake, Minneapolis, Minnesota
i
On days like this my mother reclined
in the front yard of our house on Victor,
comfortable in her canvas chair,
supervising my dad as he stoked his fire,
and swept the riotous leaves
into the pyre as higher and higher
the fiery remains danced into the sky.
ii
On this fall day I sit by a cloud-filled lake
among crowds of cattails and ducks.
Bog berries brighten among the sweet decay of leaves.
The shriveled hands of oaks hold to themselves.
They don’t help me arrange my words
as I try to ignite the flames of bygone falls
to stir their ashes for these pages.
Down Autumn
26 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted in Grief, Life Reflections, Seasons, Weekend Weather Chapbook
September is almost over
and the leaves are my flowers now.
Leaves are My Flowers Now, Michael Dennis Browne
Down autumn the geese are flying
in the thin blue air. Very soon
sun will slump its shoulders,
will not be seen as high
as the geese fly now.
Down autumn the geese are flying.
Daylight trails behind.
Soon we will be left
with only the distant hunter
to pierce the cold night sky.
Down autumn the geese are flying.
The leaves of my life are falling—
the red, the gold, the brown—
onto this landscape of
oak and open ground.
What Was and Wasn’t Reported
26 Thursday Jan 2012
November 22, 1963
Zweibach cookies like stumps
on the high-chair tray.
On TV, a smiling Jackie wearing
a shocking pink Chanel suit
and matching pill-box hat, deplanes
behind her husband, the President.
I turn the TV off and go out to hang
laundry in the sun’s eye, getting work done
before noon gets stuck in the trees. The baby content
in his carriage, another child playing inside,
another inside of me. The work gets done.
Errands are run, bills paid, I turn on the TV
again to find out what’s happening in Dallas.
The tube flickers with light, then the screen fills in
I drop the clothesbasket, a jumble
of shirts on the floor, and the baby begins to kick
inside of me, the others to cry as I scream
out to Jackie. She is hatless now.
She is standing by the new President.
I stand there too— by him, by her, by our country—
bloodstained, dazed, and rifle-shot.
The miniature fire engine, careens to some far
emergency in another room. More clothes
need to come in, a damp chill will stiffened them.
I undo each pin and take them down. Now supper
must be started.
The Unstoppable Sixties
26 Thursday Jan 2012
Jackie steps out of Air
Force One into dazzling
Dallas sun. Her handsome
Jack behind her. She’s wears
a shocking pink Chanel
and matching pill-box hat.
The Texas governor presents to her
a dozen violent roses.
She holds them in
her white-gloved hands
in case the roses run.
Now riding in the open car
in her lap she holds
her husband’s head,
feels his weight pressed on her,
the brambles of the roses.
Her suit is stained with red
as red as if the roses ran.
Aloft again,
headed back to Washington,
still in her pink Chanel,
she takes the bread, the wine
as red as if the roses ran.
A killer kills the killer
and he had a name of red—
The story doesn’t end.
On a balcony,
in a hotel lobby,
they bring down Martin, Bobby,
both lying there
in beds of blood
as red as if the roses ran
as red as if the roses ran.
Published in Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens, 2003, Pudding House Press chapbook series
Henry
19 Saturday Nov 2011
Posted in Grief, Over a Threshold of Roots
For Henry Lewis Larson
1907-1984
I left your address, 620 Walnut Street, Cloquet, Minnesota,
in my telephone book. I’d left it there all these years
after the divorce from your son. Now bent
on cleaning up, I try to erase it, but your phone number,
Triangle 9-8818, won’t disappear—stubborn,
orderly—like you.
You were so meticulous about all you possessed.
Your garage, the cleanest I’d ever seen:
green floor and white enameled walls.
Your light blue Chevrolet with the just-polished
chrome fins sat in the middle of it. An air freshener
hung between the front seats, compass inactive on the dash.
The only other items there; a snow shovel, a broom, plastic brushes,
evenly cut birches piled high. Not to clutter the space,
the family canoe rested outside against the house.
It seemed a little out of order. You loaned it every year
to some Ojibwa neighbors from Fond du Lac Reservation
so they could harvest wild rice.
But when your labored breath could no longer clean your lungs
you finally quit arranging things. It was about this time of year,
ten years ago, near winter, I couldn’t do anything but drive
the long, bleak 35 North passing from open country to pine,
to birch, arriving over the hills to see Lake Superior twisting below,
feel its breath blowing on me. I had to see you, hospitalized
in your room of polished chrome, to tell you
that I loved you. The tube in your throat, you couldn’t reassure me
when I said good-bye. It was a tone-dead day, nothing comforting
about it, that wind-swept November afternoon we buried you,
not far from Indian territory. The boys threw dirt on your casket.
It blew back on our splintered family. And I was almost glad
you were done with the messiness of caring.
Published in Over A Threshold of Roots, Sandra Larson, Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2007
Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis Died Today
19 Saturday Nov 2011
Tags
May 19, 1994
I
As if I were opening a jewelry box
to find stones priced for my life,
the jangle of blood from split arteries
the clatter of newsmen
a rasping sound
barbarous times falling into gibberish
jealousy that left its mind behind
the jeopardy of infidelity
lurch, twist, twitch
who is this court jester Oswald
and where is his cabal
the jet set left on a jet plane
her pink suit so much jetsam
Jackie—Love’s hobo now
II
The TV a pipeline to grief.
We went out into the streets
huddled at corners of the assassination
as if it happened here on this block.
Nasal voice floating endlessly
over the blood-spattered leaves of fall
saying over and over:
Ask not what your country can do for you—
ask what you can do for your country.
Game contestants couldn’t provide the answer
the rubber pointers frozen. We were left
to figure out the prize.
III
A small son in dress coat standing by
his mother’s side salutes
the cortège, the riderless horse.
On the boulevards remaining leaves
like gloved hands wave farewell.
The parade died out of sight.
Jackie in black veil,
the mystical Mona Lisa, couldn’t lead us
and her small son grew up to drown.
Jackie was born on July 28, 1929
Published Whistling Girls and Crackling Hens, Sandra Larson, Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2003
Ectopic Pregnancy
17 Thursday Nov 2011
Tags
for Loopy
Last week I was on all fours like a cat, creeping
down the hall toward the dorm mother’s room,
a small shaft of light under the door.
Nestled in a tube instead of the riverbed of me,
I could not pour you a form or a future.
The surgeon said you’d lost your way.
Standing at the edge of the roar-vast lake,
I listen as the waves thump to the shore.
You are gone. This day, only half-eaten,
I find my way back past the North Shore Hotel,
catch sight of a ladies’ luncheon scattered
in coffee cups, pools of ice cream melted
by the warmth of painted chatter. Distracted
by the hammering of a construction drill
and my own silence, I turn toward school,
knowing I am moving away from a distance
that cannot be traveled.
Published Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens, Sandra Larson, Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2003
Buried Roots
17 Thursday Nov 2011
Posted in Grief, Over a Threshold of Roots
For Mary Barter
Roads, no longer dotted with human
corpses rotting by the roadside. Huts,
no longer inhabited by mothers soot-blackened,
stirring shriveled potatoes on the hearth.
The hearth, cold. The story, dust.
Brambled walls fall down stone by stone, their work
done separating one poor farmer from another,
dividing poverty hectare by hectare.
Our connection, Great-Great Grandmother—
a thicket of lost roots.
I walked the unpaved roads
of your past looking stone by stone for you,
but my language had only a few
Celtic words—all I could say— bog, glen, bard—
sentence fragments evaporating
like the contrails of this plane
in an indifferent sky. Craggy
coasts disappear. Our story
never to be told; your history—sparse—
hidden in a spare land.
Grandmother, I am Ireland weary,
yet even without you, I will
hold you close,
eat whatever crumbs I can.
The Irish Potato Famine began in 1846. In less than two years, two million Irish—a quarter of the population had died and this became the roots of the Irish Diaspora of which my great-great grandmother was one.
Published in Over a Threshold of Roots, Sandra Larson, Pudding House Chapbook