Books by Leonard Cohen
POETRY
l.et Us Compare ,Iythologies ( l!J'Jli)
Tht' Sp!ct:-Box of Earth ( l!Jii 1)
Flower.< for Hitln (19G1)
Paw.1ites of 1/cm>cr/ (l!JGG)
F I CT I Of
The Favorite Game (1!)li3)
Iletllttiful Lose1.1 ( 1 �)fiG)
L EONARD CO H EN
S E L ECT ED PO E M S
1956 1968
The Vil<ing Press
New Yori<
Copyright © 1964, 1966, •g68 by Leonard Cohen
Copyright in all countries of 1he International Copyright Union
All rights reserved
First published in 1968 in a hardbound
edition and a Viking Compass edition by
The Viking Press, Inc.,
625 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022
Library of Congress catalog card number: 68-22317
PRINTED IN U .S. A .
Some of these poems were previously published
by The Viking Press, Inc., in a volume entitled
The Spice-Box of Earth. "This Is for You" first
appeared in Mademoiselle. Other poems first appeared in Queen's Quarterly, Prism, Saturday
Review, Pan-ic, The McGill Chapbook, and
Tamarack Review. Most of the poems have appeared in volumes published in Canada by Mc
Clelland &: Stewart Limited.
Second printing July 1 g68
Contents
I. Let Us Compare Mythologies
For Wilf and His House
:;
Prayer for Messiah
4
The Song of the Hellenist
5
The Sparrows
7
City Christ
8
Song of Patience
9
When This American Woman
ro
Song
II
These Heroics
I 2
Lovers
I)
The Warrior Boats
r4
Letter
I6
Pagans
I8
Song
20
Prayer for Sunset
2r
Ballad
23
Saint Catherine Street
24
Ballad
26
Summer Night
28
The Flier
29
Poem
:;o
The Fly
:;o
Warning
)I
Story
)2
Beside the Shepherd
33
I v
II. The Spice-Box of Earth
A Kite Is a Victim
37
The Flowers That I Left in the Ground
38
Gift
39
There Are Some Men
40
You All in White
4r
I Wonder How Many People in This City
42
Go by Brooks
4 3
To a Teacher
44
I Have Not Lingered in European Monasteries
45
It Swings, .Jocko
46
Credo
48
You Have the Lovers
50
Owning Everything
52
The Priest Says Goodbye
54
The Cuckold's Song
56
Dead Song
57
My Lady Can Sleep
58
Travel
59
I Have Two Bars of Soap
6o
Celebration
6r
Beneath My Hands
62
As the Mist Leaves No Scar
63
I Long to Hold Some Lady
64
Now of Sleeping
65
Song
67
Song
68
For Anne
Last Dance at the Four Penny
69
Summer Haiku
70
Out of the Land of Heaven
7I
vi
Prayer of My Wild Grandfather
72
Isaiah
73
The Genius
76
Lines from My Grandfather's Journal
78
III. Flowers for Hitler
What I'm Doing Here
87
The Hearth
88
The Drawer's Condition on November 28, 196 1
8g
The Suit
go
Indictment of the Blue Hole
gi
I Wanted to Be a Doctor
92
On Hearing a Name Long Unspoken
93
Style
95
Goebbels Abandons His Novel and Joins the
Party
97
Hitler the Brain-Mole
g8
It Uses Us!
99
My Teacher Is Dying
Ioo
For My Old Layton
ro2
Finally I Called
ro3
The Only Tourist in Havana Turns His Thoughts
Homeward
ro4
Millennium
ro5
Alexander Trocchi, Public Junkie, Priez pour
Nous
Io8
Three Good Nights
I I I
On the Sickness of My Love
I I 3
For Marianne
II4
The Failure of a Secular Life
II5
My Mentors
II6
vii
Heirloom
I I7
The Project
rr8
Hydra 1 963
I20
All There Is to Know about Adolph Eichmann
I22
The New Leader
I2J
For E.J.P.
I24
A Migrating Dialogue
I25
The Bus
I28
The Rest Is Dross
I29
How the Winter Gets In
I 30
Propaganda
I 3 I
Opium and Hitler
IJ2
For Anyone Dressed in Marble
IJ4
Folk
IJ4
I Had It for a Moment
IJ5
Independence
IJ7
The House
I 38
The Lists
IJ9
Order
I40
Destiny
I42
Queen Victoria and Me
I4J
The New Step: A Ballet-Drama in One Act
I45
Winter Bulletin
I64
Why Did You Give My Name to the Police?
I65
The Music Crept by Us
I67
Disguises
I68
Lot
I7I
One of the Nights I Didn't Kill Myself
r72
Bullets
I7J
The Big World
I74
Front Lawn
I75
viii
Kerensky
176
Another Night with Telescope
178
IV. Parasites of Heaven
The Nightmares Do Not Suddenly
181
A Cross Didn't Fall on Me
182
So You're the Kind of Vegetarian
Nothing Has Been Broken
184
Here We Are at the Window
185
Clean as the Grass from Which
186
When I Paid the Sun to Run
187
I See You on a Greek Mattress
188
Suzanne Wears a Leather Coat
189
One Night I Burned the House I Loved
190
Two Went to Sleep
191
In the Bible Generations Pass . . .
192
Found Once Again Shamelessly Ignoring the
Swans . . .
193
When I Hear You Sing
194
He Was Lame
195
I Am Too Loud When You Are Gone
195
Somewhere in My Trophy Room . . .
196
You Know Where I Have Been
197
I Met a Woman Long Ago
198
I've Seen Some Lonely History
200
Snow Is Falling
201
Created Fires I Cannot Love
202
Claim Me, Blood, If You Have a Story
203
He Was Beautiful When He Sat Alone
204
I Am a Priest of God
207
In Almond Trees Lemon Trees
208
ix
Suzanne Takes You Down
209
Give Me Back My Fingerprints
21 r
Foreign God, Reigning in Earthly Glory
213
I Believe You Heard Your Master Sing
214
This Morning I Was Dressed by the Wind
2I6
I Stepped into an Avalanche
217
V. New Poems
This Is for You
221
You Do Not Have to Love Me
223
It's Just a City, Darling
224
Edmonton, Alberta, December 1966, 4 a.m.
225
The Broom Is an Army of Straw
226
I Met You
227
Calm, Alone, the Cedar Guitar
228
You Live Like a God
229
Aren't You Tired
230
She Sings So Nice
2JI
The Reason I Write
231
When I Meet You in the Small Streets
232
It Has Been Some Time
233
A Person Who Eats Meat
233
Who Will Finally Say
234
Waiting to Tell the Doctor
235
It's Good to Sit with People
2 36
Do Not Forget Old Friends
238
Marita
239
He Studies to Describe
2 39
Index of First Lines
24 r
XI
I/ Let Us Com.pare Mythologies
F O R W I L F A N D H I S H O U S E
When young the Christians told me
how we pinned Jesus
like a lovely butterfly against the wood,
and I wept beside paintings of Calvary
at velvet wounds
and delicate twisted feet.
But he could not hang softly long,
your fighters so proud with bugles,
bending flowers with their silver stain,
and when I faced the Ark for counting,
trembling underneath the burning oil,
the meadow of running flesh turned sour
and I kissed away my gentle teachers,
warned my younger brothers.
Among the young and turning-great
of the large nations, innocent
of the spiked wish and the bright crusade,
there I could sing my heathen tears
between the summersaults and chestnut battles,
love the distant saint
who fed his arm to Hies,
mourn the crushed ant
and despise the reason of the heel.
Raging and weeping are left on the early road.
Now each in his holy hill
the glittering and hurting days are almost done.
Then let us compare mythologies.
I have learned my elaborate lie
of soaring crosses and poisoned thorns
I 3
and how my fathers nailed him
like a bat against a barn
to greet the autumn and late hungry ravens
as a hollow yellow sign.
P R A Y E R F O R M E S S I A H
His blood on my arm is warm as a bird
his heart in my hand is heavy as lead
his eyes through my eyes shine brighter than love
0 send out the raven ahead of the dove
His life in my mouth is less than a man
his death on my breast is harder than stone
his eyes through my eyes shine brighter than love
0 send out the raven ahead of the dove
0 send out the raven ahead of the dove
0 sing from your chains where you're chained in a cave
your eyes through my eyes shine brighter than love
your blood in my ballad collapses the grave
0 sing from your chains where you're chained in a cave
your eyes through my eyes shine brighter than love
your heart in my hand is heavy as lead
your blood on my arm is warm as a bird
0 break from your branches a green branch of love
after the raven has died for the dove
41
T H E S O N G O F T H E H E L L E N I S T
(ForR.K.)
Those unshadowed figures, rounded lines of men
who kneel by curling waves, amused by ornate birds
If that had been the ruling way,
I would have grown long hairs for the corners of my
mouth . .
0 cities of the Decapolis across the Jordan,
you are too great; our young men love you,
and men in high places have caused gymnasiums
to be built in Jerusalem.
I tell you, my people, the statues are too tall.
Beside them we are small and ugly,
blemishes on the pedestal.
My name is Theodotus, do not call me Jonathan.
My name is Dositheus, do not call me Nathaniel.
Call us Alexander, Demetrius, Nicanor . .
"Have you seen my landsmen in the museums,
the brilliant scholars with the dirty fingernails,
standing before the marble gods,
underneath the lot?"
Among straight noses, natural and carved,
I have said my clever things thought out before;
jested on the Protocols, the cause of war,
quoted "Bleistein with a Cigar. "
And in the salon that holds the city in its great window,
in the salon among the Herrenmenschen,
among the close-haired youth, I made them laugh
when the child came in:
I s
"Come, I need you for a Passover Cake."
And I have touched their tall clean women,
thinking somehow they are unclean,
as sea leless fish.
They have smiled quietly at me,
and with their friends-
! w
onder what they see.
0 cities of the Decapolis,
call us Alexander, Demetrius, Nicanor
Dark women, soon I will not love you.
My children will boast of their ancestors at Marathon
and under the walls of Troy,
and Athens, my chiefest joy-
0 call me Alexander, Demetrius, Nicanor
6 I
T H E S P A R R O W S
Catching winter in their carved nostrils
the traitor birds have deserted us,
leaving only the dullest brown sparrows
for spring negotiations.
I told you we were fools
to have them in our games,
but you replied:
They are only wind-up birds
who strut on scarlet feet
so hopelessly far
from our curled fingers.
I had moved to warn you,
but you only adjusted your hair
and ventured:
Their wings are made of glass and gold
and we are fortunate
not to hear them splintering
against the sun.
Now the hollow nests
sit like tumors or petrified blossoms
between the wire branches
and you, an innocent scientist,
question me on these brown sparrows:
whether we should plant our yards with breadcrumbs
or mark them with the black, persistent crows
whom we hate and stone.
But what shall I tell you of migrations
when in this empty sky
I 1
the precise ghosts of departed summer birds
still trace old signs;
or of desperate flights
when the dimmest flutter of a coloured wing
excites all our favourite streets
to delight in imaginary spring.
C I T Y C H R I S T
He has returned from countless wars,
Blinded and hopelessly lame.
He endures the morning streetcars
And counts ages in a Peel Street room.
He is kept in his place like a court jew,
To consult on plagues or hurricanes,
And he never walks with them on the sea
Or joins their lonely sidewalk games.
s I
S O N G O F P A T I E N C E
For a lovely instant I thought she would grow mad
and end the reason's fever.
But in her hand she held Christ's splinter,
so I could only laugh and press a warm coin
across her seasoned breasts:
but I remembered clearly then your insane letters
and how you wove initials in my throat.
My friends warn me
that you have read the ocean's old skeleton;
they say you stitch the water sounds
in different mouths, in other monuments.
"Journey with a silver bullet," they caution.
"Conceal a stake inside your pocket."
And I must smile as they misconstrue your insane letters
and my embroidered throat.
0 I will tell him to love you carefully;
to honour you with shells and coloured bottles;
to keep from your face the falling sand
and from your human arm the time-charred beetle;
to teach you new stories about lightning
and let you run sometimes barefoot on the shore.