Incognito Ergo Sum Poem by gershon hepner

I am not the man about
whom many epics have been written.
I’ve never had that sort of clout,
and no one by a bug’s been bitten
to write of me like Alexander
and Hector and Achilles. I
inspire neither priest nor cantor
to sing my praises to the sky,
and rabbis who are wise maintain
a silence that speaks louder than
a cork exploding with champagne
or belly laughs in Kazakhstan.
Not even with faint praise they damn
this man, not banging on his drum;
you might say almost that I am
incognito and ergo sum.

The last line of this poem, which Diana Lipton cites in her book Longing for Egypt (Sheffield,2008,47, n.66) , was inspired by a line from Haym Soloveitchik’s article, “Rupture and Reconstruction: The transformation of Orthodoxy, ” in Tradition,1994, where he wrote: “Most of the children of the immigrants had decisively turned their backs on the old ways of their parents. Many had even attended faithfully the chapel of Acceptance, over whose portals they saw inscribed “Incognito Ergo Sum, ” and which, like most mottoes, was both a summons and a promise.” The rest of the poem was inspired by a wonderful poem by Anna Russell:

I Am Not The Woman They Write Poems About


I am not the woman they write poems about,
Not with honesty,
Not when I cancel out, with green, the rose-tint.
My skin, though pale, is not
The alabaster of words.

I am not the woman they write poems about;
Pablo could never have pictured me still,
Nor could fourteen lines of iambic pentameter
Capture any one metaphor that would leave
No need for others.

Immortalised though my name could be in ink,
Like Beatrice and Helen and Angela,
It would not be me; it would be no more
Than the fleeting thought of a romantic heart,
Scultped into an approximate impression of
The woman they write poems about.

We are accused of offering up our souls to paper,
But, dyed as our words are with wishes,
These offerings can never not be fiction.
As my imagined personal poet Laureate writes of me,
I change desires myriad times,
Morph images a million more.

I am not the woman they write poems about.

None of us are.

3/8/07