Review: In Search of Warm Breathing Things - Katherine Gekker

IN SEARCH OF WARM BREATHING THINGS

By Katherine Gekker
2019, Glass Lyre Press, LLC;
ISBN; 978-1-941783-61-0

Katherine Gekker is a master poet. In her book, In Search of Warm Breathing Things, she takes us places surprising and disturbing, tells us things that cannot be said any other way. Almost hidden in her poetry are subtle iconic images that float below the surface and tease out the instinctive roots of our consciousness.  “Sweet Chocolate,” for example, is a simple story of a woman bringing a few Hershey’s Kisses to her mother who can no longer eat and is dying in the hospital. Written in the first person Gekker tells us:

I place one morsel in your
mouth. After a long 
time your thin neck
swallows. Your last meal.

This image of the chocolate melting on the tongue of the dying is a symbol that reaches back to the dawn of our self-awareness. There is nothing of intellect here; nothing of reason; the poem generates an emotion in which we are made to feel the capricious nature of life’s heart as well as the simple beauty it offers in our care for one another. The fragility of our existence is ever exposed.

This subtle interplay of iconic symbols is a hallmark of Gekker’s work. “Day of Beauty: Facial” is an excellent example.

The attendant knots a towel
around my face to hold my 
chin and hair in place –

like the towel the nurses
wrapped around my mother’s
face to keep her jaw from
dropping, as if we cared about this –

crosses my hands on my chest,
wraps a blanket around  me –

like the sheet the nurses
wrapped around my mother
after they crossed her hands on her chest,
so she looked  like she was praying,
as if they needed to make her 
presentable, as if she weren’t already
beautiful, her face
thin like a girl’s.

When they brought the gurney
to take my mother away, we all helped
wind her into that sheet, and  finally
covered her face, so we never saw her again,
so that the last touches she had
were from those she loved.

Today the attendant wraps
me and turns me and
touches me. Tells me –
This is a day of beauty.

To analyze Gekker’s poetry would almost be to destroy it. To be true, the analysis would have to be another poem. The only intellectual touchstone we need here in “Day of Beauty: Facial” is the realization that the preparation of the body for death is no different than the preparation of the body for life. And in this sense, Gekker’s poetry is deeply religious. Not in a sectarian way, certainly, but in that very human way where symbols lead us to a deeper affirmation of life in the midst of its inevitable separation and death. We see it in the Hershey’s Kiss melting on the tongue for example, or the shroud wrapping the body in preparation for beauty. 

Even in her lighter poems like the very clever and delightful “Number(s) Theory,” Gekker takes us to new places. She plays with the relationship between numbers and language like odd and even, addition and subtraction, numbers and people, numbers and place. She ends with the following answers:

We live on the even
side of the street

although, oddly, you
are no longer even there so
we are no longer even together.

Therefore, I am now
1, alone, and thus odd
in more ways than
numbers can count.

Nothing is ever finalized in Gekker’s work, there is always a subtlety, an obscurity that harbors the questions. So the questions linger; we are always and eternally 1, even when we are 2, and therefore even. So what does it mean to be eternally 1?  In Gekker’s poetry you might find it in a Hershey’s Kiss melting on your tongue or wrapped in a shroud for your day of beauty. 

###