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Cardinal Points

~ Poetry By Sandra Sidman Larson

Cardinal Points

Category Archives: Over a Threshold of Roots

My 2nd chapbook, a tribute to family published by Pudding House Press 2007

Small worlds of blue

26 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by Sandra Sidman Larson in Childhood, Over a Threshold of Roots, Seasons, Weekend Weather Chapbook

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circled our cottage door,
each flower cluster a replica
amassing blue in summer when blue
greeted me everywhere.

Cresting sand dunes, wind whipping
my towel into leggings, I saw
a blue line so stretched out
it had to curve to stay on earth.

Tugged skyward by the taut, unreeling string, I followed
my box kite as it rose, swooped into blue, and when it fell,
I flung it again into the morning wind. Bayside
by afternoon, balanced on snail-coated rocks,

I netted blue-shell crabs, held them
at arms length as Father had taught me,
and, on my way home, listened to their claws scratching
against the inside of my pail.

Evenings, on the screened porch reading by a lamp
set on a table with wobbly legs, I sat side by side
with Nancy Drew. In her blue roadster, we were two
independent girls, driving into the curve of mystery.

After bedtime prayers, I remember distant trains
whistling, always whistling on a straight line
to somewhere curved, somewhere
beyond our cottage, and the blue hydrangeas.

The Landscape of Things

22 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by Sandra Sidman Larson in Life Reflections, Over a Threshold of Roots

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When I started keeping house I went for a spare modern look. An Easterner, I wanted to live to the west of myself, but soon the landscape began to change. It started with my grandfather’s ornate high chair. I placed it in the dining room. My mother’s green and white doll house got a plot near the sideboard that held her silver pitcher which used to bead with sweat as we sat on the back porch sipping ice tea with sprigs of fresh mint.

After a fleur-de-lis brocade sofa arrived (my father’s mother’s who spoke to me of Popocatepetle, Iztaccihuatl and left me her prized Mexican rug), I was endowed with mahogany chairs rich with sitting and pictures of distant ancestors hung in gold leaf.

Soon other corners began to fill with my own accumulations: Balinese wood carvings, Pueblo pots hardened by the heat of sheep dung glazed with rubbing stones and more stones plucked from river beds of high desert mesas; shells from sand-strewn beaches. I nailed upon my kitchen wall a risto of red chilies gently extracted from a dead friend’s kitchen when the cancer ate completely through her bones; and who’s to say how long it will hang here, or how long before the chilies lose their bite?

Between these events, a lover’s mother gave me a set of Lenox birds, one by one, to mark special occasions, (except her son’s and my unraveling). First, a cardinal poised on porcelain trumpet flowers for a birthday, and then a robin hovering over three blue eggs for Mother’s Day, and next a realistic downy woodpecker for a long forgotten event. It ended with a cedar waxwing on a vine of morning glories.

I tell myself I must give away all the furniture, keeping only the time-varnished stones, all the stories I can remember and settle into a small, simple apartment with my dog, begin again—but maybe it’s too late for a more sparely furnished life.

Published Over a Threshold of Roots, Sandra Larson, Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2007

Henry

19 Saturday Nov 2011

Posted by Sandra Sidman Larson in Grief, Over a Threshold of Roots

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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

Jersey Argonauts

19 Saturday Nov 2011

Posted by Sandra Sidman Larson in adulthood, Over a Threshold of Roots

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Childbirth

For Dave, My first-born son

A young girl again,
running to the beach,
watching sunrise-silhouetted
fishermen leap
from bloody waters,
pull ashore
fish-filled boats.

Next to jetties
they unloaded
piles of mackerels. Gills
stilled by useless air;
the dead fish
began to stink. Listen!
Hissing—
seagulls circling.

Salt-sweating, silvered
with slippings of these fish,
jeweled by sea water,
the silent fishermen
glistened in their work.

My water breaking,
I cry out, riding waves rising,
falling. With one last surge
I expel you
slippery
onto this shore.

You begin to pump your lungs,
breathe in this ocean of air.
I listen to your gull-like cry.
Silvered by sea water
you are alive,
shining,
and I am brilliant
in this work.

Published in Over a Threshold of Roots, Sandra Larson, Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2007

Asbury Park

17 Thursday Nov 2011

Posted by Sandra Sidman Larson in Coming of Age, Love and Lust, Over a Threshold of Roots, Seasons

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For J.C.

Surf pounding on the beach—
edgy talk—
two teenagers
on its outskirts.
Sand slows their pace.
Finally the boardwalk.

A false glare of lights,
cranked up phonograph music
drowns out the pounding sound
of surf. Salt breezes
hang near as he steps up
to a booth, takes aim
at her purple desires,
wins her an over-stuffed bear.

The night deepens, the teenagers
move on through a double clutch
of evening into the rhinestone stars.
Convertible top down, they sit
in swirling distances. The only guard,
a small light in the hallway of her house.
They touch tongues over cotton-candied teeth.
Each breath they take sounds like
the miniature oceans they are.

Published in Over A Threshold of Roots, Sandra Larson, Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2007

Buried Roots

17 Thursday Nov 2011

Posted by Sandra Sidman Larson in Grief, Over a Threshold of Roots

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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

Burial Ghazal

16 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by Sandra Sidman Larson in Grief, Over a Threshold of Roots

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Mahwah, New Jersey

We stabbed holes in tin lids to keep our glass-jarred lightening bugs breathing.
Now grown, my cousins and I carry a redwood box with Dad’s burnt-down bones.

Wind echoing in the chimney, a drained maple leaf;
the leaf in azure pottery on a table by itself.

Rain raises blisters on the lake and all afternoon tints the water gray.
This is not a simple story.

Stone steps up a back porch, shelter from the storm.
Rain down the window panes. So many places. What house was that?

Isn’t the magnolia tree exquisite? my great-grandmother often asked.
Since childhood, I’ve held her memory in a magenta heart of white petals.

Every life I’ve lived, I’ve lived fresh, collecting love,
yet, many have disappeared behind strange doors.

Chipped, chiseled, the name Sidman shines on a polished stone.
My children with different names will not be buried in this unfamiliar home.

Published ReImaging, Edited by Nancy J. Bemeking, Issue 33, November, 2002, Minneapolis, MN

Wave Lengths

16 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by Sandra Sidman Larson in Grief, Over a Threshold of Roots

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For my father, Alfred Gordon Sidman, Jr.
1905-1991

An ocean seeping into your lungs,
you have no energy left to change
the rhythm of your life. Tubes run
everywhere in this intensive place of care.

We will not return to that blue bay
where salt marshes oozed
under the weedy-legged docks, and I
extracted crabs from brackish water.
It was you who taught me how
to place my fingers carefully over
a crab’s back, lift him at arms length.

On clear nights like this, hands held
in silent conspiracy, we named new
constellations made by wavering lights
of moored boats moving on edgeless waters
and stood quietly before the inexplicable
spectacle of Scorpius rising.

In the clasp of these last moments,
you can no longer point out to me
the Pleaides, Virgo and Antares.
Your hand in mine, the waves of the heart
monitor rise in sharp crests, then
flatten out as smooth as water
on a windless evening or
a wish with no horizon.

Published in Over a Threshold of Roots, Sandra Larson, Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2007

Moving Away, Room by Room

16 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by Sandra Sidman Larson in Grief, Over a Threshold of Roots

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for Eleanor Farrington Wills Newmiller Sidman
1907-1988

And that is why people make poems about the dead.
And the dead watch over them, until they are finished.

Larry Levis

In the hall mirror, the living room folds into miniature reflection;
no one seated there. But I see you, Mother, breezing through
the front door carrying packages of stories, trials, fruits, au revoirs.
You are off on another flurry of errands to fill the hours.

In the attic I spread your letters before me; words spilling out
in bundles over the summer of 1929 when the world took a dive,
and you took a boat to Europe. So breathless, the notes from Paris—
Oh, the paintings, the sculpture,
the young men, oh— and their fine white suits!

In the kitchen, I give my condolences to your pots and pans.
How wide were the recipes of your expectations
entertaining the Luddeckes, Kings and the Churches.
Excellent, tasty, a little less salt.

In the bedroom a jumble of jewelry bickers
amber with turquoise, rhinestone with gold—
nothing the secondhand dealer would take off my hands.

Your closet emptied, your bed stripped, I set bags out
for the Salvation Army truck, try to value
the salvage of all you have touched—
the purple teacups, the monogrammed towels.

The night you died I spent in your guest bedroom,
curtains blowing in the soft night wind. Slowly
their panels formed into your lace nightgown,

and your head appeared, glowing as if filled
with gossamer thoughts. Your face as real as it was
when I fed you slivers of ice and brushed
the last tear from your eye.

You were as thin as the leaves of the bougainvillea
climbing the house and as ready to quiver and fall,
and now you hovered by the bed until I thought
of the words to soothe you. I said them.

It’s all right, Mother,
I’m going to be all right. You can go now.

And without another word or gesture of regret,
you did.

Published in Over a Threshold of Roots, Sandra Larson, Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2007

Housekeeping with my Eighty-year-old Mother

16 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by Sandra Sidman Larson in Grief, Over a Threshold of Roots

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You were thrilled to see our dollhouse
restored before you came to visit—
green shutters, white siding, matchstick
window panes—just as your father had built it
when you were seven years old.

You suggested the shopping spree for miniature tables,
velvet chaises, lamps, and all that could refurbish
our house, but then it came, pain
in your side at night. We were forced
to abandon our plans.

Waiting to hear the surgeon’s report,
I’m the girl behind you watching you
at your chiffon-draped vanity, arms raised,
combing out your chestnut hair, ringed by mirrors,
perfume bottles, atomizers in clusters.

Now arms hanging, the drip of drugs from bottles to tubes,
to arms—your etherized body reflected in mirrors,
wrapped in gauze dressings. The surgeon’s report is not good.
The kidneys are fine, but the pancreas is not.

I gently comb your hair, stir up the wisps resting
on your damp forehead. I’m here, Mother.
standing before you, trying to keep you
on this side of the mirror.

Published Over a Threshold of Roots, Sandra Larson, Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2007

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