Flowers for Hitler Read online

  Flowers for Hitler

  •

  A NOTE ON THE TITLE

  A

  while ago

  this book would

  have been called

  SUNSHINE FOR NAPOLEON,

  and earlier still it

  would have been

  called

  WALLS FOR GENGHIS KHAN

  © COPYRIGHT

  Leonard Cohen, 1964

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper.

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-499-4

  The Canadian Publishers

  McClelland and Stewart Limited

  25 Hollinger Road, Toronto 16

  DESIGN: F. NEWFELD

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  What I’m Doing Here

  The Hearth

  Portrait of the City Hall

  Congratulations

  The Drawer’s Condition on November 28, 1961

  The Suit

  Business as Usual

  Indictment of the Blue Hole

  Nothing I Can Lose

  Police Gazette

  No Partners

  On the Death of an Uncharted Planet

  I Wanted to Be a Doctor

  On Hearing a Name Long Unspoken

  Finally I Called

  Style

  Goebbels Abandons His Novel and Joins the Party

  Why Commands Are Obeyed

  It Uses Us!

  The First Murder

  My Teacher is Dying

  Montreal 1964

  Why Experience Is No Teacher

  For My Old Layton

  The Only Tourist in Havana Turns His Thoughts Homeward

  The Invisible Trouble

  Sick Alone

  Millennium

  Hitler the Brain-Mole

  Death of a Leader

  Alexander Trocchi, Public Junkie, Priez Pour Nous

  Three Good Nights

  To a Man Who Thinks He Is Making an Angel

  On the Sickness of My Love

  Cruel Baby

  For Marianne

  The Failure of a Secular Life

  My Mentors

  Hydra 1960

  Leviathan

  Heirloom

  Promise

  Sky

  Waiting for Marianne

  Why I Happen to Be Free

  The True Desire

  The Way Back

  The Project

  Hydra 1963

  All There Is to Know about Adolph Eichmann

  The New Leader

  How It Happened in the Middle of the Day

  For E.J.P.

  The Glass Dog

  A Migrating Dialogue

  The Bus

  Laundry

  The Rest Is Dross

  How the Winter Gets In

  Propaganda

  Opium and Hitler

  For Anyone Dressed in Marble

  Wheels, Fireclouds

  Folk

  I Had It for a Moment

  Island Bulletin

  Independence

  The House

  Order

  Destiny

  Queen Victoria and Me

  The Pure List and the Commentary

  The New Step (A Ballet-Drama in One Act)

  The Paper

  Nursery Rhyme

  Old Dialogue

  Winter Bulletin

  Why Did You Give My Name to the Police?

  Governments Make Me Lonely

  The Lists

  To the Indian Pilgrims

  The Music Crept By Us

  The Telephone

  Disguises

  Lot

  One of the Nights I Didn’t Kill Myself

  The Big World

  Narcissus

  Cherry Orchards

  Streetcars

  Bullets

  Hitler

  Front Lawn

  Kerensky

  Another Night with Telescope

  FOR MARIANNE

  If from the inside of the Lager, a message could have seeped out to free men, it would have been this: Take care not to suffer in your own homes what is inflicted on us here.

  PRIMO LEVI

  WHAT I’M DOING HERE

  I do not know if the world has lied

  I have lied

  I do not know if the world has conspired against love

  I have conspired against love

  The atmosphere of torture is no comfort

  I have tortured

  Even without the mushroom cloud

  still I would have hated

  Listen

  I would have done the same things

  even if there were no death

  I will not be held like a drunkard

  under the cold tap of facts

  I refuse the universal alibi

  Like an empty telephone booth passed at night

  and remembered

  like mirrors in a movie palace lobby consulted

  only on the way out

  like a nymphomaniac who binds a thousand

  into strange brotherhood

  I wait

  for each one of you to confess

  THE HEARTH

  The day wasn’t exactly my own

  since I checked

  and found it on a public calendar.

  Tripping over many pairs of legs

  as I walked down the park

  I also learned my lust

  was not so rare a masterpiece.

  Buildings actually built

  wars planned with blood and fought

  men who rose to generals

  deserved an honest thought

  as I walked down the park.

  I came back quietly to your house

  which has a place on a street.

  Not a single other house

  disappeared when I came back.

  You said some suffering

  had taught me that.

  I’m slow to learn I began

  to speak of stars and hurricanes.

  Come here little Galileo –

  you undressed my vision –

  it’s happier and easier by far

  or cities wouldn’t be so big.

  Later you worked over lace

  and I numbered many things

  your fingers and all fingers did.

  As if to pay me a sweet

  for my ardour on the rug

  you wondered in the middle of a stitch:

  Now what about those stars and hurricanes?

  PORTRAIT OF THE CITY HALL

  The diamonds of guilt

  The scrolls of guilt

  The pillars of guilt

  The colours of guilt

  The flags of guilt

  The gargoyles of guilt

  The spines of guilt

  Listen, says the mayor, listen to the woodland birds.

  They are singing like men in chains.

  CONGRATULATIONS

  Here we are eating the sacred mushrooms

  out of the Japanese heaven

  eating the flower

  in the sands of Nevada

  Hey Marco Polo

  and you Arthur Rimbaud

  friends of the sailing craft

  examine our time’s adventure

  the jewelled house of Dachau

  Belsen’s drunk fraternity

  Don’t your boats seem

  like floating violins

  playing Jack Benny tunes?r />
  THE DRAWER’S CONDITION

  ON NOVEMBER 28, 1961

  Is there anything emptier

  than the drawer where

  you used to store your opium?

  How like a blackeyed susan

  blinded into ordinary daisy

  is my pretty kitchen drawer!

  How like a nose sans nostrils

  is my bare wooden drawer!

  How like an eggless basket!

  How like a pool sans tortoise!

  My hand has explored

  my drawer like a rat

  in an experiment of mazes.

  Reader, I may safely say

  there’s not an emptier drawer

  in all of Christendom!

  THE SUIT

  I am locked in a very expensive suit

  old elegant and enduring

  Only my hair has been able to get free

  but someone has been leaving

  their dandruff in it

  Now I will tell you

  all there is to know about optimism

  Each day in hub cap mirror

  in soup reflection

  in other people’s spectacles

  I check my hair

  for an army of alpinists

  for Indian rope trick masters

  for tangled aviators

  for dove and albatross

  for insect suicides

  for abominable snowmen

  I check my hair

  for aerialists of every kind

  Dedicated as an automatic elevator

  I comb my hair for possibilities

  I stick my neck out

  I lean illegally from locomotive windows

  and only for the barber

  do I wear a hat

  BUSINESS AS USUAL

  The gold roof of Parliament covered

  with fingerprints and scratches.

  And here are the elected, hunchbacked

  from climbing on each other’s heads.

  The most precious secret has been leaked:

  There is no Opposition!

  Over-zealous hacks hoist the P.M.

  through the ceiling. He fools

  an entire sled-load of Miss Canada losers

  by acting like a gargoyle.

  Some fool (how did he get in) who

  wants jobs for everyone and says

  so in French is quickly interred

  under a choice piece of the cornice

  and likes it. (STAG PARTY LAUGHTER)

  When are they going to show the dirty movie?

  Don’t cry, Miss Canada,

  it’s not as though the country’s

  in their hands.

  And next year we’re piping in

  Congressional proceedings

  direct from Washington –

  all they’ll have to do

  is make divorces.

  INDICTMENT OF THE BLUE HOLE

  January 28 1962

  You must have heard me tonight

  I mentioned you 800 times

  January 28 1962

  My abandoned narcotics have

  abandoned me

  January 28 1962

  7:30 must have dug its

  pikes into your blue wrist

  January 28 1962

  I shoved the transistor up my ear

  And putting down

  3 loaves of suicide (?)

  2 razorblade pies

  1 De Quincey hairnet

  5-gasfillcd Hampstcad bedsitters (sic)

  a collection of oil

  2 eyelash garottes (sic)

  6 lysol eye foods

  he said with considerable charm and travail:

  Is this all I give?

  One lousy reprieve

  at 2 in the morning?

  This?

  I’d rather have a job.

  NOTHING I CAN LOSE

  When I left my father’s house

  the sun was halfway up,

  my father held it to my chin

  like a buttercup.

  My father was a snake oil man

  a wizard, trickster, liar,

  but this was his best trick,

  we kissed goodbye in fire.

  A mile above Niagara Falls

  a dove gave me the news

  of his death. I didn’t miss a step,

  there’s nothing I can lose.

  Tomorrow I’ll invent a trick

  I do not know tonight,

  the wind, the pole will tell me what

  and the friendly blinding light.

  POLICE GAZETTE

  My grandfather slams the silver goblet down.

  He clears a silence

  in the family talk

  to comment on the wine.

  It’s hot. Jesus is dying of heat.

  There he lies on the wall

  of the sordid courtroom

  trying to get air into his armpits.

  Judge runs a finger

  between neck and collar –

  hands the sentence down.

  Love me this first day of June.

  I’d rather sleep with ashes

  than priestly wisdom.

  Of all the lonely places in the world

  this is best

  where debris is human.

  I kiss the precious ashes

  that fall from fiery flesh.

  On these familiar shapes

  I lay my kisses down.

  Hitler is alive.

  He is fourteen years old.

  He does not shave.

  He wants to be an architect.

  The first star tonight

  insanely high, virgin, calm.

  I have one hour of peace

  before the documented planets

  burn me down.

  NO PARTNERS

  dancer! cut them with your yellow hair

  jawbone of silk slash them down

  trouser slices lapel fragments suit debris

  heaped with choppedup stumblers

  beneath her grapewhite piston feet

  She was hardly leaping, almost stilled by all the power in her, shoulders raised, calling in everything, her elbows pressing it into her stomach. She was a single spindle in the centre of a cobweb, gathering, growing, winding us all into particles of her supreme flesh.

  She barely moved but her body screamed out motion. Her feet barely struck and lifted, almost stilled by all the power in her. Her shoulders were raised, forward, calling in everything, her elbows pressing it into her belly, fingers getting the tidbits, gathering, growing, winding us all into particles of her supreme flesh, And when we’d begone she would be in the

  centre of some vast room

  shimmering enormous at rest

  ON THE DEATH OF AN UNCHARTED PLANET

  Bilesmell in my room

  Too cold to open the window

  Lying on my bed

  Hand over mouth

  Didn’t dare speak

  Out of razorblades

  New pimples

  When suddenly

  I knew it died

  Clean blazing death

  So bright

  So irrelevant

  Puff it went

  Ten times the

  Weight of the world

  Lost to nobody

  New meteors

  New collisions

  What comfort

  At my stomach gnawed

  The divine emptiness

  I ate

  The dirty dishes

  I squeezed my face

  Fat and full

  Free as a bullet

  I did pushups

  On the 11th story

  Clean blazing death

  So bright

  So irrelevant

  Who wouldn’t

  Laugh himself

  Into monstrous health

  Just noticing it

  I WANTED TO BE A DOCTOR

  The famous doctor held up Grandma’s stomach.

  Cancer! Cancer
! he cried out.

  The theatre was brought low.

  None of the internes thought about ambition.

  Cancer! They all looked the other way.

  They thought Cancer would leap out

  and get them. They hated to be near.

  This happened in Vilna in the Medical School.

  Nobody could sit still.

  They might be sitting beside Cancer.

  Cancer was present.

  Cancer had been let out of its bottle.

  I was looking in the skylight.

  I wanted to be a doctor.

  All the internes ran outside.

  The famous doctor held on to the stomach.

  He was alone with Cancer.

  Cancer! Cancer! Cancer!

  He didn’t care who heard or didn’t hear.

  It was his 87th Cancer.

  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