! Unmethodical Discourse At A Café Table Poem by Michael Shepherd

By the flickering candlelight
of the long evenings,
inimical to study so they said

they played this game
to while away the time
between learning and authority

in that Jesuit college
in the early 1600s:

blindfolded or simply shut-eye and don’t cheat
you turn the pages of the Latin dictionary at random
and stick a pin, in turn, upon a random word;

the first to make a sentence
in the fewest rounds, the fewest words, wins
a prize of choice..

we do not know the prize
(among those severe, repressed, ambitious
boys, perhaps it’s just as well…)
or what the others drew;

but this we know: that night
René pricked a first word – ‘sum’ – ah! -
promising! a verb was useful, in this game—

the second round… he pricked on ‘ergo’…
that swift mind already playing the tables
of his agile mind…

the air was tense; they’d remember
this night, this flickering light,
forever in their future lives…

a hush (how boys fight to win
more fiercely than Christ’s soldiers,
whom they would become…)

‘Cogito’! A shout of triumph
from our René – and the rest
is history – alas..

It’s said the Devil enters in
at the third stroke; and so it was:

in three words, a lifetime’s career
as the greatest of divines
in an age of awe for the divine

were lost to mere – philosophy…
the age of Clairvaux, Cluny, Chartres
for all too brief a moment,
saw the vision of a glorious revival; but...

triumphantly, our René shouts
‘Á moi, c’est la conquéte! Le jeu d’esprit á moi! ’
(impeccable Racinian hexameter, naturellement..) –

alas for human vanity! The gods were whispering
‘Sum, ergo cogito! ’ in his spiritual ear – but no –
his chose mankind’s so vain conceit

and launched a thousand thousand
café tables on the pavement; seated there
in black, with scarf and beret, sunglasses,

in a cloud of choking gitane and gauloise smoke,
centuries of self-satisfied philosophes,
believing 'cogito, ergo sum': that they are their thought; born
as true Frenchmen, to be world thinkers, Rodin-like; and
that because they think, they are… somebody…

oh René, what a fall was there...