Steve Gehrke

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians    ...    for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same. — Plutarch, Vita Thesel The answer of course is that the ship doesn’t exist, that “ship” is an abstraction, a conception, an imaginary tarp thrown across the garden of the real. The answer is that the cheap peasantry of things toils all day in the kingdom of  language, every ship like a casket of words:bulkhead, transom, mast steps

Are you of or not of brain, matter’s boss or its crevasse, are you the body itself, or more than that, immortal you, crouched in flesh, like a vampire packed into a bat? Are you housed in me or not? The tenant or the landlord of my skin? Am I your avatar? Are you my East Berlin? Are we an I or each other’s synonym? Last night, the train I was on dimmed then re-electrified, and I thought again that we are conscious a lot less often than we suppose, that half the time in us you’re half reposed. I was in South Orange again, city of my former self’s last stand. Do you remember him, your swallowed twin, the child king whom you deposed? Oh, I know: you think you’re the buried light, the jeweled glow, the sunlight falling through the falling snow. But I’ve seen the uranium laced through your walls: you’re an equation only destruction solves. Who else but you starts each day with masturbation and ends each night with gin? And so how should I begin? Four years ago, you rose in me like a fin. It started as an overflow, a drop of go, some royal beast in me, all gasoline and yeast, unhinging its own jaw to accelerate the feast, the rails of thought so greased that the outer world began to skew, as in that moment on a train when the view becomes a wash of hues. There were clues. Phantom music in the air. At times, I’d look down at my body and think, “How’d you get there?” One day, I de-napped to find myself entrapped within the tangled logic of a subway map. All day, I’d refrain, I’d double-track. I’d talk to myself and myself talked back. Was it you? That tick I felt within the trick of thought? That wick that curled itself around me, not exploding, just making a constant tick-tick-tick that finally convinced me that I was sick, that there was a cascade of toxins in the air, that there was something queer about the neighbor’s stare, that charade of signals everywhere, an air raid in the brain, something in me left unpaid, a cosmic debt in arrears. Some nights, I’d hear the voices of my parents coming near, like waves that overlapped— she’d slap him, he’d slap her back—their rage a single note that climbed its staff for years, my siblings and I in the closet with our fingers in our ears, though still I heard one night the knife drawer heaved back, as if they really might slice each other or the house in half, and then my thoughts unweaved and I began to laugh.And it is funny, isn’t it, the way that which starts as confession ends

For my daughter