Kinkatso & Co.: THE SPICE-BOX OF EARTH

THE SPICE-BOX OF EARTH

This is a selection of Leonard Cohen's poems as published in his book The Spice-Box of Earth (1961), according to the Jonathan Cape edition of 1973.

A Kite Is a Victim

A kite is a victim you are sure of.
You love it because it pulls
gentle enough to call you master,
strong enough to call you fool;
because it lives
like a desperate trained falcon
in the high sweet air,
and you can always haul it down
to tame it in your drawer.

A kite is a fish you have already caught
in a pool where no fish come,
so you play him carefully and long,
and hope he won't give up,
or the wind die down.

A kite is the last poem you've written,
so you give it to the wind,
but you don't let it go
until someone finds you
something else to do.

A kite is a contract of glory
that must be made with the sun,
so you make friends with the field
the river and the wind,
then you pray the whole cold night before,
under the travelling cordless moon,
So make you worthy and lyric and pure.

🔯

After the Sabbath Prayers

After the Sabbath prayers

The Baal Shem's butterfly

Followed me down the hill.

Now the Baal Shem is dead

These hundreds of years

And a butterfly ends its life

In three flag-swept days.

So this was a miracle,

Dancing down all these wars and truces

Yellow as a first-day butterfly,

Nothing of time or massacre

In its bright flutter.

Now the sharp stars are in the sky

And I am shivering as I did last night,

And the wind is not warmer

For the yellow butterfly

Folded somewhere on a sticky leaf

And moving like a leaf itself.

And how truly great

A miracle this is, that I,

Who this morning saw the Baal Shem's butterfly

Doing its glory in the sun,

Should spend this night in darkness,

Hands pocketed against the flies and cold.

🔯

Gift

You tell me that silence

is nearer to peace than poems

but if for my gift

I brought you silence

(for I know silence)

you would say

This is not silence

this is another poem

and you would hand it back to me.

🔯

The Flowers that I Left in the Ground

The flowers that I left in the ground,
that I did not gather for you,
today I bring them all back,
to let them grow forever,
not in poems or marble,
but where they fell and rotted.

And the ships in their great stalls,
huge and transitory as heroes,
ships I could not captain,
today I bring them back
to let them sail forever,
not in model or ballad,
but where they were wrecked and scuttled.

And the child on whose shoulders I stand,
whose longing I purged
with public, kingly discipline,
today I bring him back
to languish forever,
not in confession or biography,
but where he flourished,
growing sly and hairy.

It is not malice that draws me away,
draws me to renunciation, betrayal:
it is weariness, I go for weariness of thee.
Gold, ivory, flesh, God, blood, moon –
I have become the expert of the catalogue.

My body once so familiar with glory,
my body has become a museum:
this part remembered because of someone's mouth,
this because of a hand,
this of wetness, this of heat.

Who owns anything he has not made?
With your beauty I am as uninvolved
as with horses' manes and waterfalls.
This is my last catalogue.
I breathe the breathless
I love you, I love you –
and let you move forever.

🔯

If It Were Spring

If it were Spring

and I killed a man,

I would change him to leaves

and hang him from a tree,

a tree in a grove

at the edge of a dune,

where small beasts came

to flee the sun.

Wind would make him

part of a song,

and rain would cling

like tiny crystal worlds

upon his branch

of leaf-green skies,

and he would bear the dance

of fragile bone,

brush of wings

against his maps of arteries,

and turn up a yellow-stomached flag

to herald the touring storm.

O my victim,

you would grow your season

as I grew mine,

under the spell of growth,

an instrument

of the blue sky,

an instrument of the sun,

a palm above the dark, splendid eyes.

What language the city will hear

because of your death,

anguish explain,

sorrow relieve.

Everywhere I see

the world waiting you,

the pens raised, walls prepared,

hands hung above the strings and keys.

And come Autumn

I will spin a net

between your height and earth

to hold your crisp parts.

In the fields and orchards

it must be turning Spring,

look at the faces

clustered around mine.

And I hear

the irrefutable argument of hunger

whispered, spoken, shouted,

but never sung.

I will kill a man this week;

before this week is gone

I will hang him to a tree,

I will see this mercy done.

🔯

There Are Some Men

There are some men

who should have mountains

to bear their names to time.

Grave-markers are not high enough

or green,

and sons go far away

to lose the fist

their father's hand will always seem.

I had a friend:

he lived and died in mighty silence

and with dignity,

left no book, son, or lover to mourn.

Nor is this a mourning-song

but only a naming of this mountain

on which I walk,

fragrant, dark, and softly white

under the pale of mist.

I name this mountain after him.

🔯

You All in White

Whatever cities are brought down,

I will always bring you poems,

and the fruit of orchards

I pass by.

Strangers in your bed,

excluded by our grief,

listening to sleep-whispering,

will hear their passion beautifully explained,

and weep because they cannot kiss

your distant face.

Lovers of my beloved,

watch how my words put on her lips like clothes,

how they wear her body like a rare shawl.

Fruit is pyramided on the window sill,

songs flutter against the disappearing wall.

The sky of the city

is washed in the fire

of Lebanese cedar and gold.

In smoky filigree cages

the apes and peacocks fret.

Now the cages do not hold,

in the burning street man and animal

perish in each other's arms,

peacocks drown around the melting throne.

Is it the king

who lies beside you listening?

Is it Solomon or David

or stuttering Charlemagne?

Is that his crown

in the suitcase beside your bed?

When we meet again,

you all in white,

I smelling of orchards,

when we meet –

But now you awaken,

and you are tired of this dream.

Turn toward the sad-eyed man.

He stayed by you all the night.

You will have something

to say to him.

🔯

I Wonder How Many People in This City

I wonder how many people in this city

live in furnished rooms.

Late at night when I look out at the buildings

I swear I see a face in every window

looking back at me,

and when I turn away

I wonder how many go back to their desks

and write this down.

🔯

It Is Late Afternoon

It is late afternoon.

I have put Beethoven on.

It is foolish to impute pain

to the intense sky

but that is what I have done.

And I will impute loneliness

to the appearing moon.

It is early night.

Down in the lighted city

the tedious hunts begin.

I have been assured

there is no cause for shame.

I am not ashamed.

I turn the music louder.

There's the moon

in my room's window.

I balance it on my thumb

and try to flip it over.

It does not turn,

but still, my thumb

is not broken.

I open the window.

I make the music softer.

I walk on Murray Hill.

The moon needs no legend.

It proclaims its interest

in time, in the immediate night.

I decide to leave it alone.

In my room

the music is turning

because I expect a friend.

🔯

An Orchard of Shore Trees

An orchard of shore trees

precise because of autumn

etches its branches

in the grey silk river

The edge of the sky

fills up with blue and soft sand

A barge bearing lights

like the leaning faces

of motionless immortal sailors

trails behind

a cat o'nine tails

made of dark chain

punishing the silken water

We never see the river

run blood red

The yellow sun is lost forever

Its loyal sky

is crumbling

like a slow avalanche

into its thickening edge

of soft blue sand

Darkness makes

a home for the world

The serpents

rise swanlike from the water

hurl their narrow tongues

at the iron hulks

of the dreaming tethered ships

If there are humans left like me

along this natural shore

they do not dare cry out

My coat is the colour

of the ruined sky

my fingers

of the soft blue sand

🔯

Go by Brooks

Go by brooks, love,

Where fish stare,

Go by brooks,

I will pass there.

Go by rivers,

Where eels throng,

Rivers, love,

I won't be long.

Go by oceans,

Where whales sail,

Oceans, love,

I will not fail.

🔯

Before the Story

... and from the roof he saw a woman

washing herself. —II SAMUEL

Far from the roof,

the child, Absalom,

is storming through

the shadows of the throne,

pausing in the dark

to smoothe his scarlet hair.

And we are lying beneath the thrones ...

Far from the roof,

the king, David,

begins the ageless psalm

which rings through caves

and tears the cobwebs

from the sleeper's face.

And we are lying beneath the caves ...

Far from the roof,

the woman,

oh the girl, Bathsheba,

bares her dripping shoulders

in a secret room,

far from any lover,

far from any man.

And we are lying beneath the castles ...

O far from any roof,

we are lying beneath the castles,

among deep branches of silver,

and the wilderness moon

lives above the whole world,

and in her light

holds us, holds us,

cold and splendid,

in her vast and cloudless night.

🔯

Alone the Master and the Slave Embrace

Alone the master and the slave embrace.

I will not tell the banker or the doctor.

See, they watch the sun descend

behind the unowned mountain.

They know nothing of covenant or phoenix.

Tonight a sun descends

beautifully behind a mountain,

and my two men

will dream this scene many times

between the times

they punish one another.

🔯

Twelve o'Clock Chant

Hold me hard light, soft light hold me,

Moonlight in your mountains fold me,

Sunlight in your tall waves scald me,

Ironlight in your wires shield me,

Deathlight in your darkness wield me.

In burlap bags the bankers sew me,

In countries far the merchants sell me,

In icy caves the princes throw me,

In golden rooms the doctors geld me,

In battlefields the hunters rule me.

I will starve till prophets find me,

I will bleed till angels bind me,

Still I sing till churches blind me,

Still I love till cog-wheels wind me.

Hold me hard light, soft light hold me,

Moonlight in your mountains fold me,

Sunlight in your tall waves scald me,

Ironlight in your wires shield me,

Deathlight in your darkness wield me.

🔯

To a Teacher

Hurt once and for all into silence.

A long pain ending without a song to prove it.

Who could stand beside you so close to Eden,

when you glinted in every eye the held-high razor,

shivering every ram and son?

And now the silent looney-bin,

where the shadows live in the rafters

like day-weary bats,

until the turning mind, a radar signal,

lures them to exaggerate mountain-size

on the white stone wall

your tiny limp.

How can I leave you in such a house?

Are there no more saints and wizards

to praise their ways with pupils,

no more evil to stun with the slap

of a wet red tongue?

Did you confuse the Messiah in a mirror

and rest because he had finally come?

Let me cry Help beside you, Teacher.

I have entered under this dark roof

as fearlessly as an honoured son

enters his father's house.

🔯

I Have Not Lingered in

European Monasteries

I have not lingered in European monasteries

and discovered among the tall grasses tombs of knights

who fell as beautifully as their ballads tell;

I have not parted the grasses

or purposefully left them thatched.

I have not released my mind to wander and wait

in those great distances

between the snowy mountains and the fishermen,

like a moon,

or a shell beneath the moving water.

I have not held my breath

so that I might hear the breathing of God,

or tamed my heartbeat with an exercise,

or starved for visions.

Although I have watched him often

I have not become the heron,

leaving my body on the shore,

and I have not become the luminous trout,

leaving my body in the air.

I have not worshipped wounds and relics,

or combs of iron,

or bodies wrapped and burnt in scrolls.

I have not been unhappy for ten thousand years.

During the day I laugh and during the night I sleep.

My favourite cooks prepare my meals,

my body cleans and repairs itself,

and all my work goes well.

🔯

It Swings, Jocko

It swings, Jocko,

but we do not want too much flesh in it.

Make it like fifteenth-century prayers,

love with no climax,

constant love,

and passion without flesh.

(Draw those out, Jocko,

like the long snake from Moses' arm;

how he must have screamed

to see a snake come out of him;

no wonder he never felt holy:

We want that scream tonight.)

Lightly, lightly,

I want to be hungry,

hungry for food,

for love, for flesh;

I want my dreams to be of deprivation,

gold thorns being drawn from my temples.

If I am hungry

then I am great,

and I love like the passionate scientist

who knows the sky

is made only of wavelengths.

Now if you want to stand up,

stand up lightly,

we'll lightly march around the city.

I'm behind you, man,

and the streets are spread with chicks and palms,

white branches and summer arms.

We're going through on tiptoe,

like monks before the Virgin's statue.

We built the city,

we drew the water through,

we hang around the rinks,

the bars, the festive halls,

like Bruegel's men.

Hungry, hungry.

Come back, Jocko,

bring it all back for the people here,

it's your turn now.

🔯

Credo

A cloud of grasshoppers

rose from where we loved

and passed before the sun.

I wondered what farms

they would devour,

what slave people would go free

because of them.

I thought of pyramids overturned,

pf Pharaoh hanging by the feet,

his body smeared –

Then my love drew me down

to conclude what I had begun.

Later, clusters of fern apart,

we lay.

A cloud of grasshoppers

passed between us and the moon,

going the other way,

each one fat and flying slow,

not hungry for the leaves and ferns

we rested on below.

The smell that burning cities give

was in the air.

Battalions of the wretched,

wild with holy promises,

soon passed our sleeping place;

they ran among

the ferns and grass.

I had two thoughts:

to leave my love

and join their wandering,

join their holiness;

or take my love

to the city they had fled:

That impoverished world

of boil-afflicted flesh

and rotting fields

could not tempt us from each other.

Our ordinary morning lust

claimed my body first

and made me sane.

I must not betray

the small oasis where we lie,

though only for a time.

It is good to live between

a ruined house of bondage

and a holy promised land.

A cloud of grasshoppers

will turn another Pharaoh upside-down;

slaves will build cathedrals

for other slaves to burn.

It is good to hear

the larvae rumbling underground,

good to learn

the feet of fierce or humble priests

trample out the green.

🔯

Sing to Fish, Embrace the Beast

Sing to fish, embrace the beast,

But don't get up from the pond

With half your body a horse's body

Or wings from your backbone.

Sleep as a man beside the sleeping wolves

Without longing for a special sky

To darken and fur your hands.

Animals, do not kill for the human heart

Which under breasts of scale or flesh will cry.

O swallow, be a heart in the wind's high breast,

River the limbs of the sky with your singing blood.

The dead are beginning to breathe:

I see my father splashing light like a jewel

In the swamp's black mud.

🔯

Inquiry into the Nature of Cruelty

A moth drowned in my urine,

his powdered body finally satin.

My eyes gleamed in the porcelain

like tiny dancing crematoria.

History is on my side, I pleaded,

as the drain drew circles in his wings.

(Had he not been bathed in urine

I'd have rescued him to dry in the wind.)

🔯

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 tip-toe 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' chamber.
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.
Her 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.

🔯

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.

🔯

The Adulterous Wives of Solomon

The adulterous wives of Solomon

Lie with young archers behind the filigree doors.

The music from his throne room, music of Negroes

And trained boys, comes over the night,

Past silver doors, into chambers

Where lovers never meant to betray their king.

How they sing, his musicians,

And our friends are lying unclothed,

Marvelling at the beauty of his court,

And though they betray him, these soldiers, these queens,

Why, they are the King's Men, they love and honour him.

O Solomon, call away your spies.

You remember the angels in that garden,

After the man and woman had been expelled,

Lying under the holy trees while their swords burnt out,

And Eve was in some distant branches,

Calling for her lover, and doubled up with pain.

🔯

The Sleeping Beauty

'You are brave', I told the Sleeping Beauty,

'to climb these steps into my home,

but I regret your man, the Kissing Prince, is gone.'

'You don't understand what story I am from,' she said,

'we both know who lives in this garden.'

Still, all those following nights

she never knew to call me Beast or Swan.

🔯

Owning Everything

For your sake I said I will praise the moon,

tell the colour of the river,

find new words for the agony

and ecstasy of gulls.

Because you are close,

everything that men make, observe

or plant is close, is mine:

the gulls slowly writhing, slowly singing

on the spears of wind;

the iron gate above the river;

the bridge holding between stone fingers

her cold bright necklace of pearls.

The branches of shore trees,

like trembling charts of rivers,

call the moon for an ally

to claim their sharp journeys

out of the dark sky,

but nothing in the sky responds.

The branches only give a sound

to miles of wind.

With your body and your speaking

you have spoken for everything,

robbed me of my strangerhood,

made me one

with the root and gull and stone,

and because I sleep so near you

I cannot embrace

or have my private love with them.

You worry that I will leave you.

I will not leave you.

Only strangers travel.

Owning everything,

I have nowhere to go.

🔯

Song to Make Me Still

Lower your eyelids

over the water

Join the night

like the trees

you lie under

How many crikets

How many waves

easy after easy

on the one way shore

There are stars

from another view

and a moon

to draw the seaweed through

No one calls the crickets vain

in their time

No one will call you idle

for dying with the sun

🔯

The Priest Says Goodbye

My love, the song is less than sung

when with your lips you take it from my tongue –

nor can you seize this firm erotic grace

and halt it tumbling into commonplace.

No one I know can set the hook

to fix lust in a longing look

where we can read from time to time

the absolute ballet our bodies mime.

Harry can't, his face in Sally's crotch,

nor Tom, who only loves when neighbours watch –

one mistakes the ballet for the chart,

one hopes that gossip will perform like art.

And what of art? When passion dies

friendship hovers round our flesh like flies,

and we name beautiful the smells

that corpses give and immortelles.

I have studied rivers: the waters rush

like eternal fire in Moses' bush.

Some things live with honour. I will see

lust burn like fire in a holy tree.

Do not come with me. When I stand alone

my voice sings out as though I did not own

my throat. Abelard proved how bright could be

the bed between the hermitage and nunnery.

You are beautiful, I will sing beside

rivers where longing Hebrews cried.

As separate exiles we can learn

how desert trees ignite and branches burn.

At certain crossroads we will win

the harvest of our discipline.

Swollen flesh, minds fed on wilderness –

O what a blaze of love our bodies press!

🔯

A Poem to Detain Me

I bound to my temples a box of flesh

filled with holy letters & captured poems –

& I am probably wrong.

With thongs of time

bind to your body

the heart of a man.

I'm heading for another border,

my scrapbooks stuffed with murder

& a crazy rumour of glory

whispering through the wires of my spine.

Lucky Cain wandered for one crime

& received on his forehead a sign

which proved in every mirror

who was the slayer and who was the slain.

Blood still is vocal,

the ground is still a home,

but now the voice accuses so many names

I do not know which name is mine.

O you will be listening for music

while I turn on a spit of song;

you will increase your love

while I experiment with pain;

while others amputate their limbs

you will master a ballet-step

away from voluntary gangrene.

Believe nothing of me

except that I felt your beauty

more closely than my own.

I did not see any cities burn,

I heard no promises of endless night,

I felt your beauty

more closely than my own.

Promise me that I will return

🔯

Angels

The cage where he ate and slept

Was furnished with gems and flesh

So he would not bruise when he fell

Or his vision ever grow dull.

Garnets are brighter than angels,

He sang as he made his poems.

Garnets are brighter than angels,

He sang as he crushed his loins.

But how he loved the golden feathers

Which fluttered through the cage;

How he loved the golden shadows

When they covered up his face.

🔯

The Cuckold's Song

If this looks like a poem

I might as well warn you at the beginning

that it's not meant to be one.

I don't want to turn anything into poetry.

I know all about her part in it

but I'm not concerned with that right now.

This is between you and me.

Personally I don't give a damn who led who on:

in fact I wonder if I give a damn at all.

But a man's got to say something.

Anyhow you fed her 5 MacKewan Ales,

took her to your room, put the right records on,

and in an hour or two it was done.

I know all about passion and honour

but unfortunately this had really nothing to do with either:

oh there was passion I'm only too sure

and even a little honour

but the important thing was to cuckold Leonard Cohen.

Hell, I might just as well address this to the both of you:

I haven't time to write anything else.

I've got to say my prayers.

I've got to wait by the window.

I repeat: the important thing was to cuckold Leonard Cohen.

I like that line because it's got my name in it.

What really makes me sick

is that everything goes on as it went before:

I'm still a sort of friend,

I'm still sort of lover.

But not for long:

that's why I'm telling this to the two of you.

The fact is I'm turning to gold, turning to gold.

It's a long process, they say,

it happens in stages.

This is to inform you that I've already turned to clay.

🔯

Morning Song

She dreamed the doctors arrived

And severed her legs at the knee.

This she dreamed on a morning

Of a night she slept beside me.

Now I was not in this dream

Or the cry of the amputee,

Yet she told me this on a morning

Of a night she slept beside me.

🔯

The Unicorn Tapestries

You stay in the grove

To ambush the unicorn.

I don't know what the hunters gave,

But all the money of the sun

Falling between the shadows of your face

In the yellow coin,

Could not bribe away the scorn

Which fastens up your mouth.

For whom are those hard lips?

The hunters creeping through the green

Beside their iron-collared hounds,

Or that towered head who soon

Will close his eyes

Between your aproned knees?

And when the animal is leashed

To the pomegranate tree,

Don't come by my prison room,

Singing your victory,

Or charm the guards to untie the chains

With which I was bound before the hunt,

When I cried I was a man.

You stay in the grove

To ambush the unicorn.

And after wander to the poisoned stream

Which the unicorn will never clean,

And greet the good beasts thirsting there,

Then follow through the holes and caves

The animals who poisoned it,

And cohabit in each lair.

I don't know what the hunters gave,

But all the money of the sun

Falling between the shadows of your face

In yellow coin,

Could not bribe away the scorn

Which fastens up your mouth.

🔯

The Boy's Beauty

For Betty

I awarded you the boy's beauty.

I gladly dedicated him undiseased and whole

that he might prove the belief in depraved swans,

the tedious theories of celestial assault.

Had your thighs quivered, your nipples hardened properly,

I would not have ordered the mutilation of his face,

the unpanicked dissection of his glory.

But to our relief you honoured with kisses

the thick neck of your husband,

and under the table manoeuvred

his sausage fingers beneath your dress.

Now we include you in all our fantasies,

continue to swear by your legendary flanks.

Our ships from the middle of the ocean,

guided by the sun's gleam on your belly,

resume their commerce between your colossus knees,

and a thousand clumsy poets

lay their stricken heads upon your breasts to sing.

🔯

The Girl Toy

The king's goldsmith once learned to work in flesh

and made his lord

a toy more precious than his famous golden birds.

Deep in the palace the king remained with her.

Servants, princes starved or went away.

Former guests came once or twice into the banquet-garden

where now the weeds involved the trees

and hammered figures, and never came again.

Deep in the palace the king remained with her.

He didn't care if sometimes he tasted gold in her mouth

or cut his aging lips on a jewelled eye.

My love, my love, he sang.

Years they gamed in and out of arches and gold furniture,

he obese and old,

she lovely as a pendulum.

And when he fell and wept and spit up blood,

on his great abdomen she'd lay her head,

and closing her eyelids like perfect machines,

she'd hum or sing a ballad of their wedding feast.

🔯

Dead Song

As I lay dead
In my love-soaked bed,
Angels came to kiss my head.

I caught one grown
And wrestled her down
To be my girl in death town.

She will not fly.
She has promised to die.
What a clever corpse am I!

🔯

Call You Grass

Call you grass

call you wind-bent slender grass

say you are full of grace

and grown by the river

Say what country

say what river

say what colour

Tell where is the clock

in the rose's face

tell where are the speared hands

bending the fences over

Call you loving in whatever room

in orchards on seas

knowing not whom you leave

whom you pass

who reaches after

Call you falling before a strange ark

beads and wedding band asunder

knowing not who watches and grieves

behind his glory wings

Claim you now

for blood fro kingdom for love

Tell the collapsed belly of Mary

tell the limbs hanging so sadly over

Claim you

Claim you in my father's name

Call you grass

🔯

As the Mist Leaves No Scar

As the mist leaves no scar
On the dark green hill,
So my body leaves no scar
On you, nor ever will.

When wind and hawk encounter,
What remains to keep?
So you and I encounter
Then turn, then fall to sleep.

As many nights endure
Without a moon or star,
So will we endure
When one is gone and far.

🔯

My Lady Can Sleep

My lady can sleep
Upon a handkerchief
Or if it be Fall
Upon a fallen leaf.

I have seen the hunters
Kneel before her hem –
Even in her sleep
She turns away from them.

The only gift they offer
Is their abiding grief –
I pull out my pockets
For a handkerchief or leaf.

🔯

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
Half-way 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.

🔯

I Have Two Bars of Soap

I have two bars of soap,

the fragrance of almond,

one for you and one for me.

Draw the bath,

we will wash each other.

I have no money,

I murdered the pharmacist.

And here's a jar of oil,

just like in the Bible.

Lie in my arms,

I'll make your flesh glisten.

I have no money,

I murdered the perfumer.

Look through the window

at the shops and people.

Tell me what you desire,

you'll have it by the hour.

I have no money.

🔯

Brighter than Our Sun

Brighter than our sun,

Bright as the window beyond death,

The light in the universe

Cleans the eyes to stone.

They prayed for lives without visions,

Free from visions but not blind.

They could only drone the prayer,

They could not set it down.

And windows persisted,

And the eyes turned to stone.

They all had faces like statue Greeks,

Marble and calm.

And what happened to love

In the gleaming universe?

It froze in the heart of God,

Froze on a spear of light.

🔯

Celebration

When you kneel below me

and in both your hands

hold my manhood like a sceptre,

When you wrap your tongue

about the amber jewel

and urge my blessing,

I understand those Roman girls

who danced around a shaft of stone

and kissed it till the stone was warm.

Kneel, love, a thousand feet below me,

so far I can barely see your mouth and hands

perform the ceremony,

Kneel till I topple to your back

with a groan, like those gods on the roof

that Samson pulled down.

🔯

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.

🔯

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.

🔯

Now of Sleeping

Under her grandmother's patchwork quilt
a calico bird's-eye view
of crops and boundaries
naming dimly the districts of her body
sleeps my Annie like a perfect lady

Like ages of weightless snow
on tiny oceans filled with light
her eyelids enclose deeply
a shade tree of birthday candles
one for every morning
until the now of sleeping

The small banner of blood
kept and flown by Brother Wind
long after the pierced bird fell down
is like her red mouth
among the squalls of pillow

Bearers of evil fancy
of dark intention and corrupting fashion
who come to rend the quilt
plough the eye and ground the mouth
will contend with mighty Mother Goose
and Farmer Brown and all the good stories
of invincible belief
which surround her sleep
like the golden weather of a halo

Well-wishers and her true lover
may stay to watch my Annie
sleeping like a perfect lady
under her grandmother's patchwork quilt
but they must promise to whisper
and to vanish by morning –
all but her one true lover.

🔯

Song

When with lust I am smitten
To my books I then repair
And read what men have written
Of flesh forbid but fair

But in these saintly stories
Of gleaming thigh and breast
Of sainthood and its glories
Alas I find no rest

For at each body rare
The saintly man disdains
I stare O God I stare
My heart is stained with stains

And casting down the holy tomes
I lead my eyes to where
The naked girls with silver combs
Are combing out their hair

Then each pain my hermits sing
Flies upward like a spark
I live with the mortal ring
Of flesh on flesh in dark

🔯

Song

I almost went to bed
without remembering
the four white violets
I put in the button-hole
of your green sweater

and how I kissed you then
and you kissed me
shy as though I'd
never been your lover

🔯

For Anne

With Annie gone,

whose eyes to compare

With the morning sun?

Not that I did compare,

But I do compare

Now that she's gone.

🔯

Last Dance at the Four Penny

Layton, when we dance our freilach
under the ghostly handkerchief,
the miracle rabbis of Prague and Vilna
resume their sawdust thrones,
and angels and men, asleep so long
in the cold palaces of disbelief,
gather in sausage-hung kitchens
to quarrel deligiously and debate
the sounds of the Ineffable Name.

Layton, my friend Lazarovitch,
no Jew was ever lost
while we tow dance joyously
in this French province,
cold and oceans west of the temple,
the snow canyoned on the twigs
like forbidden Sabbath manna;
I say no Jew was ever lost
while we weave and billow the handkerchief
into a burning cloud,
measuring all of heaven
with our stitching thumbs.

Reb Israel Lazarovitch,
you no-good Romanian, you're right!
Who cares whether or not
the Messiah is a Litvak?
As for the cynical,
such as we were yesterday,
let them step with us or rot
in their logical shrouds.
We've raised a bright white flag,
and here's our battered father's cup of wine,
and now is music
until morning and the morning prayers
lay us down again,
we who dance so beautifully
though we know that freilachs end.

🔯

Song for Abraham Klein

The weary psalmist paused
His instrument beside.
Departed was the Sabbath
And the Sabbath Bride.

The table was decayed,
The candles black and cold.
The bread he sang so beautifully,
That bread was mould.

He turned toward his lute,
Trembling in the night.
He thought he knew no music
To make the morning right.

Abandoned was the Law,
Abandoned the King.
Unaware he took his instrument,
His habit was to sing.

He sang and nothing changed
Though many heard the song.
But soon his face was beautiful
And soon his limbs were strong.

🔯

Good Brothers

Vincent and Theo

I'll dance with anyone

on your sunny graves
I'll live in cornfields
under tidal waves
of crowstained sky
I'll bellow looney sounds
to keep the crows away

Those who weep for you
who tell tales of tragic art
I'll overwhelm
with jawbones of solid light
Who wouldn't give cash
or a lobe of flesh
for six good years of sun
I'd slice my mind
for half the chance

O good brothers
your graves recoil like cannon
from the knees
of mournful pilgrims
Sunbathers
are what you need
with a taste for storms
and none for shelter
(May your yellow skeletons
be forever happy
chewing sunflowers seeds)

🔯

Summer Haiku
For Frank and Marian Scott

Silence

and a deeper silence

when the crickets

hesitate

🔯

Priests 1957

Beside the brassworks my uncle grows sad,
discharging men to meet the various crises.
He is disturbed by greatness
and may write a book.

My father died among old sewing machines,
echo of bridges and water in his hand.
I have his leather books now
and startle at each uncut page.

Cousins in the factory are unhappy.
Adjustment is difficult, they are told.
One is consoled with a new Pontiac,
one escapes with Bach and the folk-singers.

Must we find all work prosaic
because our grandfather built an early synagogue?

🔯

Out of the Land of Heaven

For Marc Chagall

Out of the land of heaven
Down comes the warm Sabbath sun
Into the spice-box of earth.
The Queen will make every Jew her lover.
In a white silk coat
Our rabbi dances up the street,
Wearing our lawns like a green prayer-shawl,
Brandishing houses like silver flags.
Behind him dance his pupils,
Dancing not so high
And chanting the rabbi's prayer,
But not so sweet.
And who waits for him
On a throne at the end of the street
But the Sabbath Queen.
Down go his hands
Into the spice-box of earth,
And there he finds the fragrant sun
For a wedding ring,
And draws her wedding finger through.
Now back down the street they go,
Dancing higher than the silver flags.
His pupils somewhere have found wives too,
And all are chanting the rabbi's song
And leaping high in the perfumed air.
Who calls him Rabbi?
Cart-horse and dogs call him Rabbi,
And he tells them:
The Queen makes every Jew her lover.
And gathering on their green lawns
The people call him Rabbi,
And fill their mouths with good bread
And his happy song.

🔯

Absurd Prayer

I disdain God's suffering.
Men command sufficient pain.
I'll keep to my tomb
Though the Messiah come.

Though He summon every corpse
To throng the final Throne,
One heap shall remain
Immovable as stone.

The ruins of men and women
Resume their hair and skin
And straightway to the altar-steps
In trembling fear they run.

They wallow in His Glory,
They scramble for his Hem.
These bodies rose from Paradise
But they kneel down in Doom.

Hyenas wait beyond the steps.
I sight them from this hole.
Their appetites are whetted,
They feed on carrion soul.

🔯

Prayer of My Wild Grandfather

God, God, God, some one of my family

hated your love with such skill that you sang

to him, your private voice violating

his drum like a lost bee after pollen

in the brain. He gave you his children

opened on a table, and if a ram

ambled in the garden you whispered nothing

about that, nor held his killing hand.

It is no wonder fields and governments

rotted, for soon you gave him all your range,

drove all your love through that sting in his brain.

Nothing can flourish in your absence

except our faith that you are proved through him

who had his mind made mad and honey-combed.

🔯

Isaiah

For G.C.S.

Between the mountains of spices

the cities thrust up pearl domes and filigree spires.

Never before was Jerusalem so beautiful.

In the sculptured temple how many pilgrims,

lost in the measures of tambourine and lyre,

kneeled before the glory of the ritual?

Trained in grace the daughters of Zion moved,

not less splendid than the golden statuary,

the bravery of ornaments about their scented feet.

Government was done in palaces.

Judges, their fortunes found in law,

reclining and cosmopolitan, praised reason.

Commerce like a strong wild garden

flourished in the street.

The coins were bright, the crest on coins precise,

new ones looked almost wet.

Why did Isaiah rage and cry,

Jerusalem is ruined,

your cities are burned with fire?

On the fragrant hills of Gilboa

were the shepherds ever calmer,

the sheep fatter, the white wool whiter?

There were fig trees, cedar, orchards

where men worked in perfume all day long.

New mines as fresh as pomegranates.

Robbers were gone from the roads,

the highways were straight.

There were years of wheat against famine.

Enemies? Who has heard of a righteous state

that has no enemies,

but the young were strong, archers cunning,

their arrows accurate.

Why then this foolish Isaiah,

smelling vaguely of wilderness himself,

why did he shout,

Your country is desolate?

Now will I sing to my well-beloved

a song of my beloved touching her hair

which is pure metal black

no rebel prince can change to dross,

of my beloved touching her body

no false swearer can corrupt,

of my beloved touching her mind

no faithless counsellor can inflame,

of my beloved touching the mountains of spices

making them beauty instead of burning.

Now plunged in unutterable love

Isaiah wanders, chosen, stumbling

against the sculptured walls which consume

their full age in his embrace and powder

as he goes by. He reels beyond

the falling dust of spires and domes,

obliterating ritual: the Holy Name, half-spoken,

is lost on the cantor's tongue; their pages barren,

congregations blink, agonized and dumb.

In the turns of his journey

heavy trees he sleeps under

mature into cinder and crumble:

whole orchards join the wind

like rising flocks of ravens.

The rocks go back to water, the water to waste.

And while Isaiah gently hums a sound

to make the guilty country uncondemned,

all men, truthfully desolate and lonely,

as though witnessing a miracle,

behold in beauty the faces of one another.

🔯

The Genius

For you

I will be a ghetto jew

and dance

and put white stockings

on my twisted limbs

and poison wells

across the town

For you
I will be an apostate jew
and tell the Spanish priest
of the blood vow
in the Talmud
and where the bones
of the child are hid

For you
I will be a banker jew
and bring to ruin
a proud old hunting king
and end his line

For you
I will be a Broadway jew
and cry in theatres
for my mother
and sell bargain goods
beneath the counter

For you
I will be a doctor jew
and search
in all the garbage cans

for foreskins
to sew back again

For you
I will be a Dachau jew
and lie down in lime
with twisted limbs
and bloated pain
no mind can understand