Visitation

poems by

Steve Gehrke

72 pages, $14 (+ shipping)

ISBN: 978-1-964277-32-5

Projected Release Date: April 2025

The Advance Sale Discount price on this title has expired. For those who prefer to pay by check, the price is $18/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412. 

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Steve Gehrke has published three previous books of poetry, including Michelangelo’s Seizure, a National Poetry Series selection and The Pyramids of Malpighi, winner of the Philip Levine Prize. He’s the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Nevada Arts Council. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Slate and many other journals. He teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Nevada-Reno.

These masterfully crafted poems, in richly textured language, Illuminate the intricacies of the domestic and the mysteries of the divine. Visitation is both an erudite and visceral consideration of what can and cannot be saved and what’s worth saving. Through poems of self and cultural revelation, Steve Gehrke carries us to a place where we can see that beyond the terrifying is beauty, and beyond the beautiful is terror, and the beyond itself, that place of passage, is, quite simply, love. ~Gailmarie Pahmeier, Nevada Poet Laureate, 2021-2024, Author, Of Bone, Of Ash, Of Ordinary Saints

REVERSE ABECEDARIAN PRAYER

Zero me out again, Lord. Reset me, as I know you can.
You, who I cannot find most days. You, who, like a wandering
X on the soul’s map, rebury yourself each day in me—
When you are gone, the world of things hardens around me.
Vistas misrevealed as veils. Each scene tugging on a flimsy
Uniform. Gone, the canal in matter through which faith-blown vision sails.
Twice before, you remade me. Once, I broke and woke mid-
Step as I walked across the concrete floor of a psych-ward.
Reciting anything—poems, TV ads—to smother my mind with
Quotes and keep my circling thoughts from circling, my childhood
Prayers returned, still in-tact, fables from another life stored
Outside the oxides of time. Mouthing those words moved me
Nearer a locked door inside my head. At its threshold, you stood
Masked in flesh, a genteel ur-father, tender-voiced, patient, even
Lightly humorous, a disguise, I understood, meant to sooth me,
Knit from my subconscious, but no less you. And as we spoke, my
Jaundiced heart began to drain, the error code flashing for days
In my brain turned celestial. How mawkish that seems to say now,
How hokey to recall the love-for-all I felt those days, the trapped
Goodness leaking forth from things. Now the weed of irony re-
Forms, my faith a petal laid down in a breeze, each day now an
Entropy born of ease. Lord, was I only ever talking to myself?
Does it matter? You’re my savior even if you’re part of me.
Clean me out, then, unclutter me. And if there remains some
Bit of glint, some last preserve, make of that inch of best
An ark and flood away the rest. Failing that, un-matter me.

PROLOGUE

~for my daughter

When you were vaulted, embargoed, tapping out
messages on the walls, when you were translucent,
opalescent, a hieroglyph coming to life in its cave,
when your body was a glowing aquarium of cells,
when you were reptilian, mammalian, quick-changing
behind the curtain’s folds, when you were a kite
unfolding the wind, an expanding mesh, an origamist
of the flesh, when you were a repetition, an exhalation,
a star’s migration, when you hopscotched the chalked side-
walks of our chromosomes, when you were docked
and moored, when you were the building storm, a collection
of notes being scored, the sampler, the copyist, the knot
of streams, the welcome plagiarist of genes,
when you were something written a thousand times,
a thousand times erased, when you were a text slowly
being traced, when the eternal grammars sifted into you
like the sediment of stars, when you were a syntax,
a structure, a map unfolding a landscape, when
you were the perfect rhyme, the one that worked,
the eureka in our laboratory of sighs, when you
were unjointed, unmade, unbecome, bodiless,
vagabond, a clapper in need of a bell, when you
were a fixation, a flirtation, our compendium,
our chapter and verse, when we groped for you
like a light switch, when you were a target, a zeroing-
in, the one lucky toss in our carnival games, a glint,
a guess, the alchemist’s dream, when you were whistling
on the stoop of our thoughts, the ventriloquist,
the eaves-dropper, the message in the ear, the sky-
written note the wind had just erased, when you
were a divided city, axed but magnetized, you longing
for you, the pheromones in the air, when we carried you
like synchronized keys, our balkanized deity,
when you were anybody’s guess, the card dealt
from the middle of the deck, the fortune-teller’s lies,
when you were fractured, rationed, metabolized backwards
through the generations, when you were a splinter
in a million different boards, a single grain in a silo of cells,
when you were the whole flock, the herd, the fire-
flies rising in the fields, when you were the fields
themselves, when you spread out across the plains,
a hundred thousand streams with the currents
reversed, when you were a universe of bees
promised to a hive, when an entire civilization
began its pilgrimage to you, when you were atoms,
electrons, the ancient seeds, morphic, mineral,
cascading down evolution’s alleyways, embroidered
in the mysteries, weren’t we already just out ahead
of you, two ghosts being erased by the fog, weren’t we
already being burned away, weren’t we a contraction,
a resolving contradiction, the final stops on your migration,
weren’t we already knotted in the braid, isn’t this a back-
wards elegy, my forward etymology, isn’t it the billions
of years before your birth that we should mourn,
aren’t you the root, the source, the pyramid’s tip,
won’t you be our mother when the causal chain flips?

MY DAUGHTER’S JOURNAL

One day her secrets might make the pages glow,
but for now what she sees is a white owl
camouflaged by snow, a kind of animal
blankness hidden in the page, a projection
of her own need to say something, to call
some part of herself forward in her mind,
but she can’t quite capture whatever feeling’s
swooping through her, at least that’s how I
imagine it as she frowns and scowls and fidgets
above the page, not wanting me to tell her
what to write, but not yet able to begin herself.
Someday she might tear pages from her journal
and feed them to the moon. Someday her feelings
will outgrow her, and she’ll walk the rest
of her life inside of them like a cartoon fog.
But for now she writes her entries in a strange
haiku: I saw a dead frog in the yard. I wish
that I could glow in the dark. How long
before the atlas is smothered in roadblocks?
How long before she’ll block us from her
Facebook page? It’s not her privacy I resist,
but the way I can already see the freshness
of the world begin to fade in her, that root system
of other selves that boredom or discontent
nourishes inside of us as we age.
The death of the true self begins with the
striving after meaning. And that begins with
the insufficiency of the world as it appears.
I got a new locket. I don’t have a picture
small enough to fit it. Sometimes I think her
refusal to elaborate is a kind of morality,
a dedication to truth that only the youngest
children can maintain. But already she is flying
away from this radical innocence, turning
the pencil over in her hand, erasing, telling me
she can’t think of anything very interesting
to say. Daughter, I have heard the dead frog
singing from your locket. I have seen the dark
yard begin to glow. And I know: the world made
small is the ultimate good. Say things simply while
you can, because already the owl shakes the last
threads of snow from its enormous wings, and
the world before you is the shadow of a lone mouse
skittering towards safety as you turn the page.