• Chapbooks
    • Weekend Weather
    • Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens
    • Over a Threshold of Roots
  • Follow Me
    • Twitter
    • Facebook
  • Who is Sandra Sidman Larson?
  • Why the title Cardinal

Cardinal Points

~ Poetry By Sandra Sidman Larson

Cardinal Points

Category Archives: Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens chapbook

My first chapbook published by Pudding House Press in 2003, poetry with an edge of calamity to it

Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis Died Today

19 Saturday Nov 2011

Posted by Sandra Sidman Larson in Grief, Politics, Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens chapbook

≈ Leave a Comment

Tags

The sixties

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

That day you admitted you’d lied to me

19 Saturday Nov 2011

Posted by Sandra Sidman Larson in Marriage, Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens chapbook

≈ Leave a Comment

Tags

divorce

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

My First Wedding Anniversary

19 Saturday Nov 2011

Posted by Sandra Sidman Larson in adulthood, Marriage, Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens chapbook

≈ Leave a Comment

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

Sophomoric Acts

19 Saturday Nov 2011

Posted by Sandra Sidman Larson in Coming of Age, Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens chapbook

≈ Leave a Comment

Grace Smith House, Connecticut College
New London, Connecticut

In memory of my roommate, Nancy Quin Davis

The year Nancy and I were sophomores
we hauled a sofa up three flights of stairs
to our room filled with Salvation Army
throw-aways. We were satisfied,
until in its broken springs
our cat was continually trapped.
She cried out with the sound
of lost hope, lost virginity,
or something else unseen.
We didn’t know what
was going on when
we heard the commotion,
and burst uninvited into Olga’s room.
She had thrown her potted plants
against the wall, each
and every pot broken,
ruined on the floor. Immobile
on her couch, she watched
as we carried out the shards
of whatever it was
that was bothering her.
She refused to explain.
We returned to our room
and tried, but, mystified,
we never could figure out ourselves
why everything that year
was falling out of grace.

Published in Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens, Sandra Larson, Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2003

My Life as Minnie Mouse

19 Saturday Nov 2011

Posted by Sandra Sidman Larson in Coming of Age, Politics, Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens chapbook

≈ Leave a Comment

Tags

feminism

I began with small ears flat
against my head.
They grew bigger each year
astounded by what they heard.

As a child I had a voice that wasn’t
appreciated. I wanted to know where
babies came from, why Grandma
never laughed at Grandpa’s jokes.

In the middle of the story I was bound up,
told I was a woman, to put heels on my feet,
gloves on my hands.

My heart longed for a guy named Mickey.
He might have been my soul mate, if he hadn’t been
so damned cute. Yet I’m not complaining,

I gained a happy attitude once
I stepped out
of polka dot dresses
and became
a little less plastic.

Published Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens, Sandra Larson, Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2003

The Owl and the Pussy Cat

17 Thursday Nov 2011

Posted by Sandra Sidman Larson in Coming of Age, Love and Lust, Marriage, Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens chapbook

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

lakes

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

The Red Dress

17 Thursday Nov 2011

Posted by Sandra Sidman Larson in Love and Lust, Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens chapbook

≈ Leave a Comment

Tags

sex

Gothic in design, fluted with knowledge.
She thought through books. The facts were there.
She flashed her library card, dropped her satchel.
The tall wooden catalogue cabinet had tongues.
They mouthed “0” for Obstetrics.
Hush! She carried up the stairs the heavy
text edited by a myriad of male experts.

In a small carrel, she fanned the pages
with nervous fingers. She would work
backwards. A baby’s delivery
threads from Gestation,
to Conception,
Conception to Prevention.

She had to skip Conception because she found
mostly Catholic theology, the Virgin Mary
and Fertility, and, furthermore, she didn’t need
fields or farms, bees or barns.
Miss Zackas, her eighth grade gym teacher,
years ago, wooden
pointer in her hand, the light dim
in the gym, had tapped the slide
projector screen, pointed to the egg’s
path from the fallopian tube to the womb
where it met up with the sperm.

Here were the facts: diaphragms took
a doctor’s fitting and clinical analysis of what
she was doing. Rubbers? Gloves best handled
by males. She was looking only for love
at just the right moment. She realized, as a bright girl
she’d have to be a scientist of The Rhythm Method.

That night dressed in ill-gotten knowledge
and flaming red lipstick, red dress, black stockings,
she purchased two tickets to a Jose Greco show,
her favorite Spanish dancer. On stage, the spotlight
came to rest on a tall figure dressed
in a suit of gray. His back to the audience,
one booted foot crossed over the other.
His slim buttocks, round
and firm, presented only the idea
of what rose in front of him.

Now a woman begins to wail. The stamping
of her feet, a lift of her skirt, his black boots
stamping in response, a stallion about to go wild,
staccato sounds reverberate, the audience
all most out of control.

Later that night she kicked off her black heels,
unsnapped her garter belt, shed her nylons,
and danced into her lover’s hard embrace.
Blood flowed to the floor and flowered.

Two weeks later it stopped and did not come back.
Her library search resumes, this time looking for
references again on Gestation.

Published in Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens, Sandra Larson, Pudding House Chapbook Series,

Ectopic Pregnancy

17 Thursday Nov 2011

Posted by Sandra Sidman Larson in Grief, Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens chapbook

≈ Leave a Comment

Tags

lakes

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

Now What Will We Do?

16 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by Sandra Sidman Larson in Childhood, Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens chapbook

≈ Leave a Comment

My panty-clad mother stands before the ironing board crying,
wiping her eyes with one hand, sawing
the iron over shirts with the other.
She’s drawn the drapes against the intense
summer heat. An odd shaped light surrounds her desire.
My father’s missed another promotion from the bank.
She waves the iron near her ear as she shakes
out another shirt.

Why can’t he push himself, speak up?
Now what will we do? Now what will we do?

In the dining room I open my Bible coloring book,
select a black crayon and draw a handlebar
mustache on the face of Jesus. 
Mother sets down her iron, advances on me
and snatches up my efforts.

Never deface the face of Jesus, never—
even atheists don’t do such things!

She shakes me back and forth
as if to iron the devil out of me.  I thought,
Jesus wouldn’t mind, he’s as gentle
as my father.

Published Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens, Sandra Larson, Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2003

She Who Moves Forward Without Moving

16 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by Sandra Sidman Larson in Grief, Politics, Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens chapbook

≈ Leave a Comment

Tags

flowers

For Diana, Princess of Wales’ on the Occasion
of her Funeral, September 6, 1997

On the casket a spray of lilies, a small
wreath of shaking tea roses. Sun mottled streets.
Bells toll. A leopard, his golden paws poised
on a maroon field, stares with alarm
at the mournful crowd. Diana’s riding
through the hunting park today. Two motherless
sons, the blood of Charles II join in. She moves
forward without moving.

Elegant women and men ushered into Westminster.
Welsh guardsmen lift the coffin. Voices of high,
boyish tenors heard above organ chords.
A catafalque awaits under the flying
arches. Over the geometry of the black
and white terrazzo, two royal lineages at odds,
she moves forward without moving.

Limousines pull up in front. The Welsh
guardsmen again, shoulders interlocked,
load the hearse with the weight of an old century
that believes these tears are too trite
for affairs of state. She moves forward
without moving

The hearse heads north to an island crypt
fit for a sister of Ophelia
where on a weedy breeze the sweet power
of discarded women rests and moves
forward without moving.

Published Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens, Sandra Larson, Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2007

← Older posts
Newer posts →

♣ My Latest Tweets

Tweets about "from:SidmanLarson"

♣ Categories

  • adulthood (4)
  • Childhood (24)
  • Coming of Age (6)
  • Gatherings (5)
  • Grief (21)
  • Life Reflections (10)
  • Love and Lust (12)
  • Marriage (5)
  • Over a Threshold of Roots (23)
  • Politics (14)
  • Seasons (39)
  • Uncategorized (5)
  • Weekend Weather Chapbook (31)
  • Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens chapbook (26)

♣ RSS Poetry News

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.