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.
26 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted in Love and Lust, Marriage, Seasons, Weekend Weather Chapbook
Holland is a dream, Monsieur, a dream of gold
and smoke Albert Camus, The Fall
i
I still see you as you rose
those mornings,
light falling gently
on your lean limbs.
We drove through tulip fields,
a patchwork of surreal orange,
yellow, green, purple, red—
a countryside better suited
to a dream.
ii
At Christmas an amaryllis
arrives at my door.
A surprising flower—
it breaks the soil.
A shaft rising to its full height
tense with byways
of waiting—
an epiphany coming—
blooming
with all the colors
of memory,
with all the colors
of you.
19 Saturday Nov 2011
Tags
a door pushed open
and little men,
Tomten-like, marched in.
They filed by,
one by one, and sat
against the wall, stared
at you and me as if this were
some kind of Norwegian
pow wow.
Quietly, without any
fanfare or flourish
they held up
short little wands
and waved them
in front of our noses.
Caught in the light,
ice crystals flashed,
although not truly visible.
I did not feel the cold,
yet I began to shiver.
You seemed to shrink,
to look distant—
as if a wide chasm
were forming between us
while the Tomtens began to talk
in a very strange language
and ours changed too.
I wanted to be able
to move, to beat up
the little guys
with their ice sticks
and you,
but I was now
in a deep cave
turning into a stalagmite
and you a stalactite,
and the children, the space
between.
Published, Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens, Sandra Larson, Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2003
19 Saturday Nov 2011
Don’t go to the Midwest to school, you’ll marry there and never come
home again.
– Eleanor Sidman
Don’t be silly, Mother. That’s not going to happen.
– Sandra Sidman
In mid air, flung out like a sack of rutabagas
from the arms of a mountain
of a man dressed in lederhosens,
swung wide into a cloudbank of noise
I asked myself,
How did you get into this polka party?
You can’t even spell the name of the place.
In Schlief’s Little City, with shiny wooden floors
shaking, the grammar of my life was changing.
These men in short pants could dance.
My bridegroom was too reserved to move
so fast.
What were we celebrating?
Seven months of pregnancy & morning
sickness? No money? Little romance
between the pages of anatomy books?
As the evening progressed, swept in
and out through a veil of purple light
illuminating an invisible symbol
stamped on my hand, I was held parallel
to the floor in this smorgasbord of chaos.
Women dressed in hardanger-stitched vests, puffy,
white shirts and skirts, stuffed with layers
of petticoats, swayed and swirled.
They danced with so much grace, while I –
the newest immigrant—raised on ballet
and ballroom dancing–stumbled across the floor.
I’d brought only black clothes, my books,
a silver tea set from an austere grandmother who
never would have come here in the first place.
Published Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens, Sandra Larson, Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2003
17 Thursday Nov 2011
Tags
Moonlit night, the Chicago Yacht Club, me
in a borrowed taffeta gown, you
in Bermuda shorts and dinner jacket.
On the heels of the moment
we planned the voyage to escape the dance.
(Our excitement and sense of romance a bit
choppy.) A dingy bobbing at the dock.
We stole it, rowed out toward a dark horizon,
while the maitre d’ rushed out, flailed
his arms like semaphores
against the wind, trying to coax us
back. We might have surmised
that navigation would be
troublesome with only one oar
and a broom, yet we produced three sons,
drifted and turned until, finally,
the boat broke asunder
and we swam to our separate shores.
Once there, we turned to our sons, waved
our arms like the maitre d’ and shouted,
Stay ashore, stay ashore
this boat doesn’t belong to you,
but like us, they didn’t believe it.
Published in Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens, Sandra Larson, Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2003