After Mr. Cogito's Mother

in darkness
rear servants stairs
vanderbilt
hyde park, ny

After Mr Cogito’s Mother

the left

given to leaps…

the right

nobly rigid…

and so

on both legs

Mr Cogito

goes

through the world

staggering slightly

                                On Mr Cogito’s Two Legs

                                Zbigniew Hebert

I have to do the math backwards although any

one with any shred of aptitude would simply say

eleven just like that eleven it’s been eleven

years already only eleven years and say it

like it’s only been a week it’s been a week a week’s gone

by already though I appreciate how we don’t

even know some among us when we stop 

counting or when counting stops meaning

something even though it slips perfect as

a master dovetail joint into place all that

cutting all that sharp angle sanded to dust has become

and what it is that makes us the us is just me

because who else does this in my life I don’t

know who else is seeing that this year your birthday will fall

hmmph, fall, like love I guess or glass or you

in the bathroom on your last of last days

on a Monday and you died the next day the day

after three weeks later.  You’d been given a few hours

at least to be sixty and my father wanted it

that way though all he’d say is that he wouldn’t let you

die on your birthday.  He couldn’t

appreciate the symbolism in that and so

he made you wait it out for a few more

hours and then left you before you

were finished.  I’m not judging that not in the way

people who can do simple math who arrive

at their facts just like that and if I could

I’d snap my fingers here and make

the whole crowd blink for its fist in the palm

affect though gentle gentle and without

a shred of revenge.  I bring it up

because I always think at this time

of year you would’ve been wanting to

bring the whole garden in all at once so

you could get it done and sit on the couch

and have a smoke.  I bring it up

because this year Thanksgiving falls

early on that fourth Thursday of five

as it happens just like the year when

you died.  I bring it up because lately

I’ve been thinking about Descartes and his

Cogito bullshit and two poets are happening

to be having a conversation on the radio

about Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito

Laments and it makes me take him up

off the top shelf where he holds

all the rest of them (Bishop and Moore and Yev-
tushenko and and Miloz and Nemerovski)

I have to move

the teaspoon of bone and ash I have

(stashed is the wrong word but tucked

might not work either) of my friend

Roger who died eight months

after you did and right away I know I’m going

to put down everything I’ve been doing

and take up with him again.  Herbert

I mean.  And remember all the things

he ever said to me, really said to me,

and fall in like a foot soldier on rations

having marched halfway across Africa

or Canada or for him Poland with some of

God in his pocket.  I could say his story

is so much sadder than yours and though

I wouldn’t be wrong I wouldn’t know exactly why

that would be except to say Poland

and World War Two and Stalin and you’d get it

you’d understand at least from

the perspective of suffering something

you did your whole life and held up

like evidence at a trial like it was

the missing piece in a complicated

it’s not going well for whoever’s side

you’re on and BAM! the whole ocean

is turned and Moses pats you on your back

for your acrobatics.  Ok, that’s a bit

blasphemous and cheap I get it and maybe

you’d slap me if you were here but you’re not

and so I read Herbert’s Mr. Cogito and think

maybe you’d go down on your knees

after reading ‘Mother’ and clothe your cold

bones even after that first line:

He fell from her lap like a ball of yarn.

Or would you have to wait like the rest of us

to get to the end to be broken to see

after the boy leaves her and continues

to fall far away from her she holds on

like any sound shelter far away from him

she holds on a station master a place

to wait ‘her outstretched arms’ that

glow in the dark like an old town

the only thing I see after you die and move

away and come back and move away

far far away at the foot of your bed.

in light
rear servants stair
vanderbilt
hyde park, ny