Have you heard a stone
skip across a frozen pond
at night?
Ringing blue beyond the fires
it caroms off everything,
absorbed by nothing.
Pewless in a dark church,
pleading for a choir,
it licks lambent vibrato
from ear to ear with
nothing soft to settle on.
It could warm a pang
but lasts without us,
as if the moon holds still
while prayers wander
into the woods.
Feb. 2014
All her other lives: ingratiating,
played beyond our window frames.
Frost caught between universes;
parallels cutting through supernovas,
not waiting for a bang.
Faster than that!
“Don’t write me at this address.”
I get it–her galaxy
skittering across the moonlit ice,
caroming from muffled laughing fires,
looking for the Horsehead Nebula
while we wait and buck our reins.
Parallels to parallels to where?
To all these campfires,
to carriages and restless hooves,
all the gracious calculus defining
moonlight traced on frosted panes?
The bang?
She sees love scratch a figure eight,
embellished with a three-turn:
a lovely note on ice.
We watch and stamp and steam,
hamed to the night;
yet our breath never reaches her stars.
Gavin W Sisk
Jan, 2014
Painted bricks
and the Charleston.
Sequined breasts dancing
down a barrel bar.
John from Jersey City
sent me. I have cash!
Goodness, the smoke.
And hot!
Take this and this
and this and hang them up
and you’re a dear,
and dearer still if you’ll
fill me up.
The glass, silly!
Or my flask if you dare.
Would you dare?
(Perched on planks.
with pendulum heels
and pensive throat.)
Watching my knees?
Never seen inertia?
Don’t get entropy?
Well, sleep on it–
by yourself if you don’t
fill me up.
The glass, silly!
You didn’t even notice
the planks are oak.
Bronx boy,
be a dear.
G W Sisk
Jan, 2014
Every time I write a crooked slice
of my funny sideways life,
I end up flopped on the couch
with all the pink
sucked out of my tender middle.
Maybe that’s how you feel
sometimes
after bouts with the reality
that blood remembers gravity
the more it flows.
We tire easily as we go.
So why should our heads
perch so far from our feet?
Though our brains ride astride
our mouths (on good days),
our respiration
must be fussed over by organs
that might as well be on the moon.
Through the lungs, the heart,
and down the line–
flushed through miles of old pipes–
the oxygen falls into our slippers,
only to bother our gout.
The birthday candles glow bright
as our heads grow light.
There’s barely blood to wake our noses
to smell the burning wicks and
decide the lilies in the vase are real.
That’s how some days seem to me,
though younger than you.
But I digress.
And you can still tell:
the lilies came from a friend’s garden.
You smell vanilla in the cake.
The milk is fresh;
the blanket soft.
More is right and young than wrong.
Your head is stuck where it is because
it’s a good place for your eyes,
which over the window sill
see beauty your slippered feet
might barely feel.
Birds do better than murmur
in the Oklahoma sun,
which rises old but warm.
All the senses can be painted
from your chair,
whether you lift a brush or not.
You do.
So, without regret shall I.
For my friend, Jo Ann Duck Teter
Oct. 28, 2013
I am enjoying Rosie’s litter box.
Something I enjoy about summer is
Rosie’s litter box.
Winter is when my neighbors enjoy
Rosie’s litter box.
The difference is rubber bands.
Rubber bands are the difference between
summer and winter litter boxes.
Rubber bands are a connection
between summer and winter.
Rubber bands and cat poop are connected,
as far as summer and winter are concerned.
One good thing about summer is
that’s when I don’t notice the connection
between Rosie’s poop and rubber bands.
Summer is when I don’t notice that
Rosie’s poop is connected by rubber bands.
Rosie eats rubber bands.
Rosie doesn’t use her litter box in summer.
I am enjoying Rosie’s litter box;
which is great,
but where does she get the rubber bands?
Sept. 11, 2013
Visiting Hours
Worked all day and evening.
Haven’t seen her since yesterday.
Trundled into the house, she hugging my heels.
No time for whiskey; She has an appetite.
Order up!
Purrs and paws my pants while I take too long
to scoop her kibbles from the plastic bin.
Now what the hell, you furry fickle?
Two bites and you’re scratching at the door?
You’re spayed! That tom won’t take you.
But I see that the moon will.
Aug. 13, 2013
When I wrote the above first version of this poem I imitated my daughter’s writing process. I had an experience, recognized its potential, and immediately wrote it down. It should be simple.
This process works well for my daughter partly because I’ve taught her to always swing for the fence. Partly also because I’m careful to stay out of her way, and because there has been less crap in her life to pollute her perceptions. She mostly throws down the right words on her first try. If she makes small mistakes, they shouldn’t matter–proper punctuation is for adults.
I am an adult. Tenderized by middle age, I don’t often swing for the fence. Hell, my life experiences have made the fence all but invisible. Instead of exploring my thoughts, I tend to write what I believe I ought to be thinking, or what I hope will seem to others to be good thinking. So I must approach writing, especially poetry, incrementally. Instead of baseball, I play golf.
Every poem has a par. I tee off with a driver (usually hooked behind a handsome tree) and proceed toward a distant hole in fits and fights against my own mysterious nature. A hole-in-one is theoretically possible but highly improbable. For me, writing is a game of one damned thing after another–of seeing the light but listening for the tick of the bullshit meter. Writing is rewriting. Driver, six iron, wedge, putter—perception, delusion, epiphany, closure (that’s a good hole). What keeps me playing the game is knowing the woods are full of as many flowers as lost balls.
Here is what may be the finished version of the above poem. My daughter warned me against fiddling too much with the original. For me, though, such weightless subjects as cats are opportunities to disregard the bullshit meter. It’s not Eliot, and that’s fine.
Visiting Hour
Worked all day and evening.
Haven’t seen her since last night.
Trundle into the house, she hugging my heels.
No time for whiskey; Rosie has an appetite.
Purrs and paws my pants while I take too long
to fumble through the cupboard, shuffling beans
and soup and sauce to finally find the fish flakes,
and bend to scoop her kibbles from the bin.
Order up!
Now what the hell, you furry fickle?
Two bites and you’re scratching at the door?
You’re spayed! That tom won’t take you.
But I see that the moon will.
Aug. 17, 2013
Phylogenic soup cooked down;
infused, rarified, and sparked
into ontogenized complexities:
perplexing organized antipathies.
A nap, a push, a slap on the ass.
Dry me off and promise not to lie.
Aug 4, 2013
If these three men were me,
we each to each would bow,
politely (achooing snarks);
implicate one’s a cuttlefish,
one’s a cunning shark,
then infer who’s left’s a lover;
and understand the differences
but not the reasons why
each have ruled each other.
We throw ballast at Poseidon
from a plowing trimaran.
Kings: at one time or another.
Gavin W Sisk
July 26, 2013
From last night’s little text messaging bout between my young daughter and myself:
Me
Me encanta la pequeña rana en el oido.
Hana
You sing a little frog in my ear?
Me
Sirenas cantar, pero no mientras Dios susurra.
Hana
And how would the sirens know
if God whispered,
aside from being alive?
The sea rolling on itself
every day, striking the rock’s face
and somewhere else drowning a good sun?
We doubt the words were spoken.
But where bees’ wings are pinned to the sky
we can see the words sewn into their hem.*
Me
I have been one-upped by the best. Nice poem.
Hana
Being alive should be living.
Me
Dolphins laugh and leap and love the
fate of lovers’ lives who slip the nets.
Hana
Love the end.
Me
Thanks.
Yes, being alive should be living. Our birth
is gone forever. We can only guess about our
death. Life is all that’s left. Always here, it’s the
only thing we can touch. And we can’t touch the
lives of others if we can’t learn to touch our own.
I touched you at birth. I’ll love you forever.
Writing like this–extemporaneous, undirected–is to writers as Polaroid film used to be to photographers. I’ve spent thirty years carefully calculating shutter clicks and conforming shapes and tones to my mind’s eye. Sometimes, though, my mind seemed to have no eye. Paralysis by analysis, I call it. It describes a total lack of progress despite possession of knowledge, skills, tools, and resources for conquering the world. Sometimes when that happened, I’d grab my old Polaroid camera and head out the door, leaving all calculations and expectations behind.
I’m often struck by paralysis when I need to write. But instead of rummaging through my closet for the Polaroid, I pull my phone from my pocket and tap out a message to someone. No rules. No planning. No expectations. If I catch my daughter in a writing mood, I get back twice what I give.
May 24, 2013
* by Hana Kurahara Sisk
Two poets combing the Columbia Plateau.
I cruise control with both legs crossed
and two fingers linking the steering wheel
to my left elbow flying out the window like
a loose pontoon. Between nods she gazes
land-struck at the rumpled quilts of basalt
and fields plowed down for hay and beets.
Father and daughter: cheap and cheaper.
Super 8 tonight with a side of rumbling 90.
But not before Grand Slams at Denny’s
as the sun sets on our roaming holiday.
April 19, 2013
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