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