Re: Cognition

Roslin Cordain

You wake up, kind of. More like:
You collide with the present.
Whap you’re in bed, eyes half-
sightless in the warm dark,
whiplashed somehow, though your jaw is
limp, though your pinkie
reflexively caresses
your wife’s pajama sleeve. You think,
What time is it? Was I asleep?
That’s how it goes. It’s not just a night thing, either:
Boom you’re mid-chew, goo on the molars
(What’s this? Chips and guac?), fingers salted,
your butt sunk into the sofa
with Steve Harvey on the TV. Or fwip
you’re at the card table, three of diamonds
centered on the deck past
the skyline of your cards—
they are fanned confidently
(this is a problem)
like peacock feathers. Now why—
now what—you flush, you search
your face for its expression as it fades.
That’s what it’s like: Arriving all the time,
becoming all mornings.

They’re like, God, that sounds awful, J.J.
That’s not what I meant. Or Ron, sayer of
whatever, might add: Bruce had that.
Remember? It started with those crazy dreams—
The guys with green hats were standing
in his bedroom and then
he quit going out, he was spitting up
on himself, and, um, yeah, he died.
I’m like, Great. If I could think
faster I’d add: That Bruce? Dude was
confusing (what was it)
lightning bugs with tracer rounds
back in the seventies, if you knew him. Whatever.
Now instead of Bruce we have

Louis Maggie Bob with the glasses Bob without the glasses

Ron (obviously) and Alice—all of us

reclaiming our island

in this archipelago

of a coffee shop—we scrape
together two tables and converge

proudly round the new shape.
Our landmass casts a shadow
over the terrazzo, which is freckled
with silver, like sunlit water.
The noise of us rises, heats the air:

Stop reading the news but he really said like fine wine, you know six

months out they were from here though guess it’s shut down who would

have thought …shoes for the little dog?

It’s gotten harder to hear
in sentences. Sometimes, like now,
I find myself wrapped in a cast
of sound: Each fragment
is living plaster, sealing me in my
breath, my hesitation. Jimmy, did you
have something to add?, I was—
well—that’s all right. Their quickness is
all but crippling, though my body
holds its rhythm, smiling and laughing
without me. God, I’ve lost it. Am I gone
to you already, as in cut off,
grown over, numbed out?
Loudly, I plunk my bone-white cup
down in its rimmed saucer, but
they keep talking. What would they do—
Louis, Bob, Bob, Ron, Alice—
If I groaned, or stood up
suddenly, or dropped a spoon?
What would they do
If I reached across the table
right now, if in anger I
touched their faces,
held their shoulders?

II.

I go to the park by the river
to take pictures.

The water speaks of nothing.
The grass admits me with no
fuss, soft against my ankles.
I draw wind as breath and let it go.

When I hold the camera
it is like steadying a second
me two feet away, saying look, sky,
cedar, current, people, pine, and pine,
and pine, and even geese, wow!
I point my own gaze, force it almost:
My hands are blinkers over the sides;
my eyelashes shutter. Except today,

I take a step forward onto
the bare iris of the lens
I thought was, you know, equipped.
—CRUNCH!—
Well, shit. In the distance,

A doe looks up from munching, a rudder
of strength through that neck. Her ears
pan toward me with alien clarity,
like little dowsing rods. We freeze.
O great big eyes! O fellow knees!
What is it like to be a grazing thing,
the feast rolling out all around you—
so much that, as a fact of your life,
you walk all over it? I do not

move and there is the same stillness that perhaps

the camera feels when it takes a picture

and I have been trying to say (to louisbobbobronalice)

that in losing yourself endlessly, you may find yourself

hyperpresent. I look down

At the lens, now kaleidoscope fodder
in a dark ring, light-triangles slanted
as if to herald my step,

mine, clumsy man

who leaves the fridge door open,
who the other day called his wife “Susan”
(and he knows zero Susans), who now carries

in his heart

a precarious openness, just

as fractured glass
invites grass to stand tall
through the new apertures.

Or maybe it’s like

the echosong of the hermit thrush
(round brown billowy thing)

that just now

rings out at me:

It sings from a high, open location.

That call is water freezing in midair
and tumbling musically upon the Earth.

You might even say the sound
is inseparable from the sky
it is birthed in. Really,

most of everything is half-void, annulus,
forged in emptiness or obscurity:

A neuron firing into the ether
of consciousness—
a seedling with the instinct of up—

The reaching look of the deer
before it bounds away.

No picture, then,
No picture today.

III.

When you meet people,
you cannot beg them to see you.

You cannot solicit
your soul from the other.

One does not say (for instance,
at a dinner party): By the way,
I used to be good.

So I show them Gone Fishing,
and Pink Flowers, and Venice Canal;

I show them Quiet Aurora
and Gulls On Beach;

I show them Waiting for Sunrise and

James Gets His Master’s and/or

Look! I Have A Family!;

They might like Slow Mornings;
Self-Doubt; Red Eyes;
Disturbance In the Clinic;

Or maybe The Phone Call;

Or the one named
Wait, Where Are You Going?

Perhaps they’ll get a kick out of

Speaks 5 to 6 Words Clearly or

Speaks only 1 Word Clearly;

Will they nod with gravitas

At Can No Longer Sit Up and
Can No Longer Hold Up Head?

Like a child I worry
that I am not protectable enough:
That my slowness is maddening,
my complaints grating,
that even my anxiety
has a stench. So tell me:
Have I framed my life
to your liking? Dying:

Am I doing it right?

IV.

Bright today

through the

glass.

Down to my feet.

I think …

we could go for a walk. Saw

pictures just now. Lucky

bastard.

Come back then.

Come here my hands are cold

Roslin Cordain works in the field of dementia prevention. She holds a B.A. in Cognitive Science and Philosophy from Beloit College. Her poetry is forthcoming in Pictura Journal and HALSEY Literary Reader.