Mr Cogito And The Imagination

1

Mr Cogito never trusted

tricks of the imagination

the piano at the top of the Alps

played false concerts for him

he didn't appreciate labyrinths

the Sphinx filled him with loathing

he lived in a house with no basement

without mirrors or dialectics

jungles of tangled images

were not his home

he would rarely soar

on the wings of a metaphor

and then he fell like Icarus

into the embrace of the Great Mother

he adored tautologies

explanations

idem per idem

that a bird is a bird

slavery means slavery

a knife is a knife

death remains death

he loved

the flat horizon

a straight line

the gravity of the earth

2

Mr Cogito will be numbered

among the species minores

he will accept indifferently the verdict

of future scholars of the letter

he used the imagination

for entirely different purposes

he wanted to make it

an instrument of compassion

he wanted to understand to the very end

- Pascal's night

- the nature of a diamond

- the melancholy of the prophets

- Achilles' wrath

- the madness of those who kill

- the dreams of Mary Stuart

- Neanderthal fear

- the despair of the last Aztecs

- Nietzsche's long death throes

- the joy of the painter of Lascaux

- the rise and fall of an oak

- the rise and fall of Rome

and so to bring the dead back to life

to preserve the covenant

Mr Cogito's imagination

has the motion of a pendulum

it crosses with precision

from suffering to suffering

there is no place in it

for the artificial fires of poetry

he would like to remain faithful

to uncertain clarity