Fifteen Poems
Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen’s artistic career began in 1956 with the publication of his first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies. He has published two novels, The Favorite Game and Beautiful Losers, and eleven books of poetry, including Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs, Book of Longing, and Leonard Cohen: Poems and Songs. He has released fourteen studio albums, the most recent of which, You Want It Darker, was released in 2016. Cohen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010, and was awarded the Glenn Gould Prize in 2011. Mr. Cohen died in 2016.
ALSO BY LEONARD COHEN
BOOKS
Leonard Cohen: Poems and Songs (2011)
Book of Longing (2006)
Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs (1993)
Book of Mercy (1984)
Death of a Lady’s Man (1978)
The Energy of Slaves (1972)
Selected Poems, 1956–1968 (1968)
Parasites of Heaven (1966)
Beautiful Losers (1966)
Flowers for Hitler (1964)
The Favourite Game (1963)
The Spice-Box of Earth (1961)
Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956)
ALBUMS
Popular Problems (2014)
Old Ideas (2012)
Dear Heather (2004)
Ten New Songs (2001)
The Future (1992)
I’m Your Man (1988)
Various Positions (1984)
Recent Songs (1979)
Death of a Ladies’ Man (1977)
The Best of Leonard Cohen (1975)
New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1973)
Live Songs (1972)
Songs of Love and Hate (1971)
Songs from a Room (1969)
Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967)
Fifteen Poems
Leonard Cohen
A Vintage Short
Vintage Books
A Division of Random House LLC
New York
FIRST VINTAGE EBOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2014
Copyright © 1993 by Leonard Cohen and Leonard Cohen Stranger Music, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 by Old Ideas LLC
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House company. Originally published as an eShort by Everyman’s Library, a division of Random House LLC, New York, in 2012
Vintage Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
The Cataloging-in-Publication Data for Fifteen Poems is available from the Library of Congress.
Vintage eShort ISBN: 978-0-307-96168-6
Cover art by Leonard Cohen.
Cover design by Carol Devine Carson.
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1_r3
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Also by Leonard Cohen
Title Page
Copyright
Letter
When This American Woman
These Heroics
Beneath My Hands
I Long to Hold Some Lady
Her hand in sand, no. 1
When I Uncovered Your Body
Travel
You Have the Lovers
You can’t emerge
The Poems Don’t Love Us Anymore
On Hearing a Name Long Unspoken
The background singers
Death of a Lady’s Man
Follow me
The News You Really Hate
Not cruel enough
I Draw Aside the Curtain
The Night Comes On
The Embrace
Torn
LETTER
How you murdered your family
means nothing to me
as your mouth moves across my body
And I know your dreams
of crumbling cities and galloping horses
of the sun coming too close
and the night never ending
but these mean nothing to me
beside your body
I know that outside a war is raging
that you issue orders
that babies are smothered and generals beheaded
but blood means nothing to me
it does not disturb your flesh
tasting blood on your tongue
does not shock me
as my arms grow into your hair
Do not think I do not understand
what happens
after the troops have been massacred
and the harlots put to the sword
And I write this only to rob you
that when one morning my head
hangs dripping with the other generals
from your house gate
that all this was anticipated
and so you will know that it meant nothing to me
—from Let Us Compare Mythologies, 1956
WHEN THIS AMERICAN WOMAN
When this American woman,
whose thighs are bound in casual red cloth,
comes thundering past my sitting-place
like a forest-burning Mongol tribe,
the city is ravished
and brittle buildings of a hundred years
splash into the street;
and my eyes are burnt
for the embroidered Chinese girls,
already old,
and so small between the thin pines
on these enormous landscapes,
that if you turn your head
they are lost for hours.
—from Let Us Compare Mythologies, 1956
THESE HEROICS
If I had a shining head
and people turned to stare at me
in the streetcars;
and I could stretch my body
through the bright water
and keep abreast of fish and water snakes;
if I could ruin my feathers
in flight before the sun;
do you think that I would remain in this room,
reciting poems to you,
and making outrageous dreams
with the smallest movements of your mouth?
—from Let Us Compare Mythologies, 1956
BENEATH MY HANDS
Beneath my hands
your small breasts
are the upturned bellies
of breathing fallen sparrows.
Wherever you move
I hear the sounds of closing wings
of falling wings.
I am speechless
because you have fallen beside me
because your eyelashes
are the spines of tiny fragile animals.
I dread the time
when your mouth
begins to call me hunter.
When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want to summon
the eyes and hidden mouths
of stone and light and water
to testify against you.
I want them
to surrender before you
the trembling rhyme of your face
from their deep caskets.
When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want my body and my hands
to be pools
for your looking and laughing.
—from The Spice-Box of Earth, 1961
I LONG TO HOLD SOME LADY
I long to hold some lady
For my love is far away,
And will not come tomorrow
And was not here today.
There is no flesh so perfect
As on my lady’s bone,
And yet it seems so distant
When I am all alone:
As though she were a masterpiece
In some castled town,
That pilgrims come to visit
And priests to copy down.
Alas, I cannot travel
To a love I have so deep
Or sleep too close beside
A love I want to keep.
But I long to hold some lady,
For flesh is warm and sweet.
Cold skeletons go marching
Each night beside my feet.
—from The Spice-Box of Earth, 1961
WHEN I UNCOVERED YOUR BODY
When I uncovered your body
I thought shadows fell deceptively,
urging memories of perfect rhyme.
I thought I could bestow beauty
like a benediction and that your half-dark flesh
would answer to the prayer.
I thought I understood your face
because I had seen it painted twice
or a hundred times, or kissed it
when it was carved in stone.
With only a breath, a vague turning,
you uncovered shadows
more deftly than I had flesh,
and the real and violent proportions of your body
made obsolete old treaties of excellence,
measures and poems,
and clamoured with a single challenge of personal beauty,
which cannot be interpreted or praised:
it must be met.
—from The Spice-Box of Earth, 1961
TRAVEL
Loving you, flesh to flesh, I often thought
Of travelling penniless to some mud throne
Where a master might instruct me how to plot
My life away from pain, to love alone
In the bruiseless embrace of stone and lake.
Lost in the fields of your hair I was never lost
Enough to lose a way I had to take;
Breathless beside your body I could not exhaust
The will that forbid me contract, vow,
Or promise, and often while you slept
I looked in awe beyond your beauty.
Now
I know why many men have stopped and wept
Halfway between the loves they leave and seek,
And wondered if travel leads them anywhere—
Horizons keep the soft line of your cheek,
The windy sky’s a locket for your hair.
—from The Spice-Box of Earth, 1961
YOU HAVE THE LOVERS
You have the lovers,
they are nameless, their histories only for each other,
and you have the room, the bed and the windows.
Pretend it is a ritual.
Unfurl the bed, bury the lovers, blacken the windows,
let them live in that house for a generation or two.
No one dares disturb them.
Visitors in the corridor tiptoe past the long closed door,
they listen for sounds, for a moan, for a song:
nothing is heard, not even breathing.
You know they are not dead,
you can feel the presence of their intense love.
Your children grow up, they leave you,
they have become soldiers and riders.
Your mate dies after a life of service.
Who knows you? Who remembers you?
But in your house a ritual is in progress:
it is not finished: it needs more people.
One day the door is opened to the lovers’ chambers.
The room has become a dense garden,
full of colours, smells, sounds you have never known.
The bed is smooth as a wafer of sunlight,
in the midst of the garden it stands alone.
In the bed the lovers, slowly and deliberately and silently,
perform the act of love.
Their eyes are closed,
as tightly as if heavy coins of flesh lay on them.
Their lips are bruised with new and old bruises.
His hair and his beard are hopelessly tangled.
When he puts his mouth against her shoulder
she is uncertain whether her shoulder
has given or received the kiss.
All her flesh is like a mouth.
He carries his fingers along her waist
and feels his own waist caressed.
She holds him closer and his own arms tighten around her.
She kisses the hand beside her mouth.
It is his hand or her hand, it hardly matters,
there are so many more kisses.
You stand beside the bed, weeping with happiness,
you carefully peel away the sheets
from the slow-moving bodies.
Your eyes are filled with tears, you barely make out the lovers.
As you undress you sing out, and your voice is magnificent
because now you believe it is the first human voice
heard in that room.
The garments you let fall grow into vines.
You climb into bed and recover the flesh.
You close your eyes and allow them to be sewn shut.
You create an embrace and fall into it.
There is only one moment of pain or doubt
as you wonder how many multitudes are lying beside your body,
but a mouth kisses and a hand soothes the moment away.
—from The Spice-Box of Earth, 1961
THE POEMS DON’T LOVE US ANY MORE
The poems don’t love us any more
they don’t want to love us
they don’t want to be poems
Do not summon us, they say
We can’t help you any longer
There’s no more fishing
in the Big Hearted River
Leave us alone
We are becoming something new
They have gone back into the world
to be with the ones
who labour with their total bodies
who have no plans for the world
They never were entertainers
I live on a river in Miami
under conditions I cannot describe
I see them sometimes
half-rotted half-born
surrounding a muscle
like a rolled-up sleeve
lying down in their jelly
to make love with the tooth of a saw
—from The Energy of Slaves, 1972
ON HEARING A NAME LONG UNSPOKEN
Listen to the stories
men tell of last year
that sound of other places
though they happened here
Listen to a name
so private it can burn
hear it said aloud
and learn and learn
History is a needle
for putting men asleep
anointed with the poison
of all they want to keep
Now a name that saved you
has a foreign taste
claims a foreign body
froze in last year’s waste
And what is living lingers
while monuments are built
then yields its final whisper
to letters raised in gilt
But cries of stifled ripeness
whip me to my knees
I am with the falling snow
falling in the seas
I am with the hunters
hungry and shrewd
and I am with the hunted
quick and soft and nude
I am with the houses
that wash away in rain
and leave no teeth of pillars
to rake them up again
Let men numb names
scratch winds that blow
listen to the stories
but what you know you know
And knowing is enough
for mountains such as these
where nothing long remains
houses walls or trees
—from Flowers for Hitler, 1964
DEATH OF A LADY’S MAN
The man she wanted all her life
was hanging by a thread.
“I never even knew how much
I wanted you,” she said.
His muscles they were numbered
and his style was obsolete.
“O baby, I have come too late.”
She knelt beside his feet.
“I’ll never see a face like yours
in years of men to come,
I’ll never see such arms again
in wrestling or in love.”
And all his virtues burning
in the smoky holocaust,
she took unto herself
most everything her lover lost.
Now the master of this landscape
he was standing at the view
with a sparrow of St. Francis
that he was preaching to.
She beckoned to the sentry
of his high religious mood.
She said, “I’ll make a space between my legs,
I’ll teach you solitude.”
He offered her an orgy
in a many-mirrored room;
he promised her protection
for the issue of her womb.
She moved her body hard
against a sharpened metal spoon,
she stopped the bloody rituals
of passage to the moon.
She took his much-admired
oriental frame of mind,
and the heart-of-darkness alibi
his money hides behind.
She took his blonde madonna
and his monastery wine.
“This mental space is occupied
and everything is mine.”
He tried to make a final stand
beside the railway track.
She said, “The art of longing’s over
and it’s never coming back.”
She took his tavern parliament,
his cap, his cocky dance;
she mocked his female fashions
and his working-class moustache.
The last time that I saw him
he was trying hard to get
a woman’s education
but he’s not a woman yet.
And the last time that I saw her
she was living with a boy
who gives her soul an empty room
and gives her body joy.
So the great affair is over
but whoever would have guessed