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
My mother was a tough nut, but I made peace with her before she died. “I love you,” was the last human sentence she heard. I spoke it. I also whispered it at the funeral home as I watched her body slide into the crematory oven. The technician shut the door, lit the burner, folded his gloved hands, and smiled kindly. I watched for a while before retiring to a stroll in the surrounding cemetery. I was given more than a year to prepare for my mother’s death. What I had forgotten was that the process of death, unlike birth, has an industry, but no product.
Outside, ashes were falling from near the crematory chimney. As I reached out to catch a large gray flake drifting through the air, it suddenly blew away. I understood how crematories operate and that flying ash could only come from a hearth-fire in a nearby residence, but I hoped it was my mother. A few minutes later, as I sat on a shaded bench, a small gray squirrel scrambled up to my feet. It stood on its hind legs and looked straight into my eyes. Squirrels have always been good to me, so I bent to give its head a friendly scratch. I wondered if my mother had sent it. The little emissary hurried away before I touched it, before I mistook I could touch my mother.
Memories of the dead often dart like unexpected swallows in the evening sky. Sparked from our cloudy minds, they wheel on sharp wings before dissolving in a mist. A friend calls them grief motes, though they sometimes make us smile. My mother was a bigger bird, swan sized, with wings to crack a man’s head. She should therefore spark a bigger mote with a trumpet call to scare the Hell out of me. Instead, she’s mostly soft and mute. Neither a hurried squirrel nor darting bird, she hums softly in the garden, leaving my other grief motes alone.
Life is the product of birth. Memory, imagination, and death, are processes of life.
May 27, 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
Gavin W Sisk
I didn’t make good latte art today. But it tasted good. Nicaragua Finca La Tormenta: where the beans were grown. I haven’t a clue what that translates to. All I know is it’s a small plantation in some country in Central America. Nicaragua, I think (duh!). Does this make me pretentiously provincial? I’m not certain those two words like how I’ve forced them together.
Anyway, as far as latte foam and inkblot tests go, my first impression was of a nuclear Star Spangled Banner that went horribly out of control on Mars billions of years ago, blasting genetically modified organisms all the way to Earth where they landed in widespread lifeless mud puddles.
If they had missed Earth and instead landed on Venus, would art, politics, and the daily news be different there? Would Venusians have learned much earlier in their existence that sunbathing is bad for their health? What arrangement of Earth’s sterile topographical features would they infer as proof of an ancient existence that may have blown itself to smithereens one day after lighting a grossly oversized, celebratory skyrocket?
I can imagine small robotic rovers crawling across the Mojave Desert, searching for elemental signs of life. They would blast strange frequencies into scoops of dead dirt and transmit the results to anxious two-headed scientists back on Venus who, if lucky and astute, would rightly deduce that Mars was the culprit all along. Then, after publishing their conclusions and supporting data, they would each be hanged twice for heresy (once for each head).
Or maybe the shape floating in my coffee cup looks like a little jellyfish having a poop.
My therapist takes lots of notes. I think she’s writing a book.
May 18, 2013
I remember standing there,
leaning by a shirtless man
holding spanners and a beer,
near crankshaft shadows
twisting and crawling in the sun.
Watched a young kid’s arm
argue with the starter rope
of a broken old gas mower.
No spark, no grass to cut,
just a boy in need of sweat.
Used water pump: ten bucks.
Even saved the old gasket.
Sunburned half my white ass
cursing the part into place.
Finished just in time to toast
the sunset on my lovely lawn.
April, 2013
Gavin W Sisk
Doll 41
I started playing years ago with the purely human quality of anthropomorphization. In particular, I’ve always been interested in inducing an anthropomorphic response in a viewer and then disrupting the response or having it fall away altogether. If I do my job right (or am lucky), what remains for the viewer is the structure or mechanism of the effect. This is the actual subject.
I get the ball rolling using posing and lighting techniques on subjects having built-in qualities I think I can control. I exploit these subjects’ potential for looking alive, but then disturb that potential by exposing props and defects in the subject. What I’m shooting for are certain qualities of confusion rather than a simple ‘gotcha’. These confusions are springboards for our ability to add living qualities to inanimate objects and are foundational to human culture. What’s difficult for me is bringing subjects to the edge of pain, happiness, ecstasy, even special qualities of human empty-headedness, without leaving the viewer with a sense that either the subject or themselves have been robbed of something or been unfairly treated. The images should be mirrors of us. I could use this human facility to make cheap shots, but I won’t. This is a unique facility we humans should rejoice in owning.
March 24, 2013
Fallen ranks of red:
stamen spent, petals bent,
septum perrianders
mined to renderless;
now a trail of fragile
crumbs cracked brown,
to be ground to dust
while the clock sweats.
Hand over hand it hauls
from east to west to
test the moon’s resolve
to cool each bloom
and wake a hope
where hopeless rests.
Feb, 2013
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