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
