Extraordinary Life of Tadeusz Kosciuszko in Several Invoices

Coffee was his preferred

bitter bread

of exile.

Back in the country        with large cabbage reserves,

he was little pan Tado

                                       from a thatched house under the doting trees

afraid to drown

in a small pond of shade

pouring from an old ash.

Over time, on his face, pan Tado grew Pan’s grotesque mask.

From Paris, he sent an invoice to Thomas Jefferson:

Outstanding balance for American independence.

                                 Far Far Far Away

“Worthy friend and General,” “Son of Liberty,”

Jefferson addressed him in his letters.

He didn’t know how to spell Kosciuszko’s name.

The dotted i ’s and crossed double t ’s of

“remittance”

speckled the pages like specular stone.

Jefferson owed to this military engineer

                                with a background in Brassica oleracea,

leader of scythemen, author of one polonaise, a Pole

but more like a flying Dutchman,

who popped up on both sides of the Atlantic,

wanted by wars, revolutions, uprisings

named after him, a prison

and his family’s cabbage estate

where forget-me-nots speckle the red fescue.

Out of applewood,

Kosciuszko carved a tray for his coffee

and wrote to the clatter

of a wooden leg on a never-deserted road:

I beg Mr. Jefferson that in case I should die without will or testament

As a knife takes off through a cabbagehead,

I think of him here,

on the East Coast, on horseback,

scouting these hills, rocks, the rapidity of the local streams.

Indeed, Pan Kosciuszko, hooved god of the wild

from a thatched house under the doting trees.

Ladies loved Pan. In Philadelphia,

he drew their portraits, flattering them beyond belief.

He also drew blueprints

fattening General Washington’s rosy-cheeked faith

in victory.

Tado cracked cheeky envoys from Krakow:

at this point big honor to eat

And, to his sister: Anna, You must do better with cabbages.

I try not to think of him here, this

general of the homeless with unpronounceable

names, fortifying

foreign forts, growing

impatient, suspicious, suicidal, never

married, suffering from jaundice, depression,

and from the failure of the regular remittance.

Blue forget-me-nots in the red fescue,

the scornful twinkle of his will.

He was a lonely person among cabbageheads.

He was the only person among cabbageheads.

Now his overcaffeinated heart

is crammed into a bronze urn.

I embrace you a thousand times,

but from the bottom of my heart,

Kosciuszko wrote to Jefferson from Solothurn, Switzerland,

at a secretary desk with gazelle-like legs,

facing a wall.

In court, Jefferson denied three times

Kosciuszko’s gift of manumission

(“I’m too old for gifts”).

A Swiss pathologist undressed

his corpse that used to be addressed

by General Washington      as

“ ... Coscu ... ?”

He was surprised

by its small size

under all those clothes,

so coarse with scars:

scars closed, scars

breathing, ghostly,

gross.

An invoice to self:

out of a corpse

The casket with this heartless corpse

was carried by paupers

paid, according to Kosciuszko’s will

—of which nothing else would be paid accordingly—

one thousand francs each.

A lonely person among cabbageheads.

The only person among cabbageheads.

An invoice to self:

Tado’s small heartless body