Fifteen Poems Read online

  Leonard Cohen

  Leonard Cohen was born in 1934 in Montreal. One of the most admired poet-songwriters of our time, he began his career publishing poetry and prose before recording his first album in 1967. 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.

  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_r2

  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
r />   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