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

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

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

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

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

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