The Ships of Theseus

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 a casket
of words: bulkhead, transom,
mast steps. The answer
is to wake again to the banality
of things, to wade toward
the light inside the plasma
of ideas. But each plank
is woven from your mother's
hair. The blade of each oar
contains the shadow of
a horse. The answer
is that the self is the glue between
the boards, the cartilage
that holds a world together,
that self is the wax in
the stenographer's ears,
that there is nothing the mind
won't sacrifice, each item
another goat tossed into
the lava of our needs.
The answer is that this is just
another poem about divorce,
about untombing the mattress
from the sofa, your body
laid out on the bones of the
double-jointed frame, about
separation, rebuilding, about
your daughter's missing
teeth. Each time you visit
now you find her partially
replaced, more sturdily
jointed, the weathered joists
of her childhood being stripped
away. New voice. New hair.
The answer is to stand there
redrawing the constellation
of the word daughter in
your brain while she tries
to understand exactly who
you are, and breathes out
girl after girl into the entry-
way, a fog of strangers that
almost evaporates when
you say each other's
names. Almost, but not quite.
Let it be enough. Already,
a third ship moves
quietly toward you in the night.

– Steve Gehrke (2013)