Nor can I know how many more
will pass ere I’m unstrung
and all that’s left this song you placed
upon your creature’s tongue
Montreal, 1978
DAYS OF KINDNESS
Greece is a good place
to look at the moon, isn’t it
You can read by moonlight
You can read on the terrace
You can see a face
as you saw it when you were young
There was good light then
oil lamps and candles
and those little flames
that floated on a cork in olive oil
What I loved in my old life
I haven’t forgotten
It lives in my spine
Marianne and the child
The days of kindness
It rises in my spine
and it manifests as tears
I pray that a loving memory
exists for them too
the precious ones I overthrew
for an education in the world
Hydra, 1985
ALSO BY
LEONARD COHEN
Beautiful Losers
“Gorgeously written … one comes out of it having seen terrible and beautiful visions.” —The New York Times
First published in 1966, Beautiful Losers demonstrates that its author is not only a superb songwriter but also a novelist of visionary power. Funny, harrowing, and fiercely moving, it is a classic erotic tragedy, incandescent in its prose and exhilarating for its risky union of sexuality and faith.
As imagined by Leonard Cohen, hell is an apartment in Montreal, where a bereaved and lust-tormented narrator reconstructs his relations with the dead. In that hell two men and a woman twine impossibly and betray one another again and again. Memory blurs into blasphemous sexual fantasy—and redemption takes the form of an Iroquois saint and virgin who has been dead for all of 300 years but still has the power to save even the most degraded of her suitors.
“Brilliant, explosive, a fountain of talent … James Joyce is not dead.… He lives in Montreal under the name of Cohen … writing from the point of view of Henry Miller.”
—Boston Sunday Herald
FICTION/0-679-74825-3
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