I won’t be able to sing it
Because it will climb too high
She will sing it beautifully
And I’ll correct her singing
And she’ll correct my writing
Until it is better than beautiful
Then we’ll listen to it
Not often
Not always together
But now and then
For the rest of our lives
ROSHI’S POEM
Whenever I hear
The edgeless sound
In the deep night
O Mother!
I find you again.
Whenever I stand
Beneath the light
Of the seamless sky
O Father!
I bow my head.
The sun goes down
Our shadows dissolve
The pine trees darken
O Darling!
We must go home.
Tr. Leonard Cohen
KANYE WEST IS NOT PICASSO
Kanye West is not Picasso
I am Picasso
Kanye West is not Edison
I am Edison
I am Tesla
Jay-Z is not the Dylan of anything
I am the Dylan of anything
I am the Kanye West of Kanye West
The Kanye West
Of the great bogus shift of bullshit culture
From one boutique to another
I am Tesla
I am his coil
The coil that made electricity soft as a bed
I am the Kanye West Kanye West thinks he is
When he shoves your ass off the stage
I am the real Kanye West
I don’t get around much anymore
I never have
I only come alive after a war
And we have not had it yet
March 15, 2015
OLD FRIENDS
An old man tells his friend (over the telephone) that
he is going to shule that evening. It is a broken-
down shule in a hostile black neighbourhood in Los
Angeles. There is never even half a minyan (ten
men). The worshippers are old, the prayers are badly
spoken, the place is draughty and full of shabbiness
and lumbago. The old man is inviting his friend to
laugh with him over the wreck of a failed spiritual
adventure, an adventure in which both of them once
cherished the highest hopes. But his friend does not
laugh. His friend becomes Nachmanides, the
Bodhidharma, and St. Paul all rolled into one religious
accountant. “You should not have told me that you
were going to shule. You lose all the merit you
would have gained had you remained silent.” What?
Merit? Silence? Who is the old man talking to?
That’s rich. His friend is rebuking him for boasting
about his piety, but he lets it go (sort of). After
they say goodnight, the old man puts on his robes,
which don’t fit so well now that he’s given up
smoking. There is an almost full bottle of Prozac on
his night-table. He bought the refill a couple of
months ago, but almost immediately stopped taking
the pill. It didn’t work. Hardly anything works
anymore. You can’t even tell your friend (over the
telephone) about your lumbago without getting a
lecture. At least his dentist didn’t reproach him
when he went back last week. After two years’
absence and a rotting mouth which everyone
(dentist, assistant, himself) could smell when the
scraping started. His dentist was an old man too.
“Let’s tackle this,” was all he said. The old man ties
the strings of his robe and puts on all the lights in
the house (so he won’t get robbed again). He drives
into the war zone, locking his doors on the way, and
he parks in the courtyard of the zendo (it isn’t really
a shule). Eunice is there. She’s been there for
twenty-five years. “At my age,” I heard her say the
other night, something about how easily she catches
cold now. Koyo is there. I forget his Christian name.
The fingers of his right hand are swollen from a cat
bite. Infected. He fumbles with the incense. Eunice
sneezes and coughs and hacks. A police helicopter
drowns out the chanting. The place is freezing. Just
the three of us. The fluff is coming out of the
cushion, just like the juice is coming out of this
story, and I’m not pissed off at you anymore either,
Steve. And what is more, old friend, you have a
point. You have a point.
1985
THE APPARENT TURBULENCE
You were the last young woman
to look at me that way
When was it
sometime between 9/11 and the tsunami
You looked at my belt
and then I looked down at my belt
you were right
it wasn’t bad
then we resumed our lives.
I don’t know about yours
but mine is curiously peaceful
behind the apparent turbulence
of litigation and advancing age
WATCHING THE NATURE CHANNEL
the boredom of God
is heartbreaking
fiddle fiddle fiddle
THE CREATURE
the creature who says
“me” and “mine”
need not bend down in shame—
along with lakes and mountains
the ego is created
and divine
THE INDIAN GIRL
You’re waiting. You’ve always been waiting. It’s nothing new. You’ve waited whenever you wanted anything, and you were waiting when the kettle sang to the canary and the Indian girl let you make love to her secretly before she died in a car accident. You were waiting for your wife to become sweet, you were waiting for your body to become thin and muscular, and the girl from India, in her apartment on Mackay Street, she said, Leonard, you’ve been waiting for me all afternoon, especially when we were all listening to the canary in your wife’s kitchen, that’s when it really got to you, the three of us standing in front of the cage, the kettle whistling and our great expectations for the canary, the song that was going to lift the three of us out of the afternoon, out of the winter—that’s when the waiting was too much for you, that’s when I understood how deeply and impersonally you desired me, and that’s when I decided to invite you into my arms. Supposing she said this to herself. And then I drove her home and she invited me up to her apartment and she did not resist my profound impersonal affection for her dark unknown person, and she saw how general, how neutral, how relentlessly impersonal was this man’s aching for her—and she took me to the green Salvation Army couch, among the student furniture, she took me because she was going to die in two weeks in a car accident on the Laurentian highway, she took me in one of her last embraces, because she saw how simple I would be to comfort, and I was so grateful to be numbered among her last generous activities on this earth. And I went back to my wife, my young wife, the one who would never thaw, who would bear me children, who would hate me for one good reason or another all the days of her life, who would know a couple of my friends a little too well. We stood, the three of us, listening to the duet of the canary and the kettle, the steam clouding the windows of our kitchen on Esplanade, and the Montreal winter shutting everything down but the heart of hope. Mara was her name, and she came to visit us, as we made visits in those days, driving through the snow to meet someone new.
1980
MARY FULL OF GRACE
You
step out of the shower
Oh so cool and clean
Smelling like a flower
From a field of green
The world is burning Mary
It’s hollow dark and mean
I love to hear you laugh
It takes the world away
I live to hear you laugh
I don’t even have to pray
But now the world is coming back
It’s coming back to stay
Stand beside me Mary
We have no time to waste
The water’s not like water now
It has a bitter taste
Stand beside me Mary
Mary full of grace
I know you have to leave me
The clock is ticking loud
I know it’s time to leave me
The time has come around
My heart has turned to weaponry
That’s why my head is bowed
Stand beside me Mary
We have no time to waste
The animal is bleeding
And the flower is disgraced
Stand beside me Mary
Mary full of grace
THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
The Los Angeles Times
is going to be read
by a man named Carlo.
He will die carrying his wife
(who cannot use her legs)
to the bathroom.
I will sit in the sun
writing about them.
My dog will die,
my hamster, my turtle
my white rat, my tropical fish
my Moroccan squirrel.
My mother and father will die,
and so will my friends Robert and Derek.
Sheila will die
in her new life without me.
My high school teacher will die,
Mr. Waring.
Frank Scott will die,
leaving a freer Canada behind him.
Glenn Gould will die
in the midst of his glory.
Marshall McLuhan will die
having altered several meanings.
Milton Acorn will die
just after putting out his cigar
on my carpet.
Lester B. Pearson will die
wearing the bow tie of Winston Churchill.
Bliss Carman will die
before I learned about his loneliness.
The Group of Seven will die
having made some places famous
where I used to camp,
where I pitched my tent
and gutted fish
in the loving sight of Anne of Carlyle.
My brother-in-law,
the most eminent of all Frequent Flyers,
he will die a True Son of the Law
and leave my sister 2 million miles.
It doesn’t matter
that all these deaths occurred
long before I prophesized them.
History will overlook
the tiny glitches in sequential time
and concentrate
rather
on my relentless concern
with matters mostly Canadian.
Terrace of Medical Building, November 15, 1999
YOU WANT TO STRIKE BACK AND YOU CAN’T
You want to strike back and you can’t
And you want to help but you can’t
And the gun won’t shoot
And the dynamite won’t explode
And the wind is blowing the other way
And no one can hear you
And death is everywhere
And you’re dying anyhow
And you’re tired of the war
And you can’t explain one more time
You can’t explain anymore
And you’re stuck behind your house
Like an old rusted truck
That will never haul another load
And you’re not leading your life
You’re leading someone else’s life
Someone you don’t know or like
And it’s ending soon
And it’s too late to begin again
Armed with what you know now
And all your stupid charities
Have armed the poor against you
And you’re not who you wanted to be
Not remotely he or she
How am I going to get out of this
The untidy mess the untidiness
Never to be clean again or free
Soiled by gossip and publicity
You’re tired and it’s over
And you can’t do any more
That’s what this silence
That’s what this song is for
And you can’t explain anymore
And you can’t dig in
Because the surface is like steel
And all your fine emotions
Your subtle insights
Your famous understanding
Evaporate into stunning
(To you) irrelevance
I don’t remember when
I wrote this
It was long before 9/11
WHEN YOU WAKE UP
When you wake up into the panic
and the tulips from Ralph’s
have almost had it,
why don’t you change the water
and cut the stems,
maybe find a vase a little taller
to help them stand up straight?
When you wake up into the panic
and the Devil’s almost got you
to throw yourself off the cliffs of religion,
why don’t you lie down
in front of the ferocious traffic
of your daily life
and get creamed by some of the details?
December 13, 1993
WHEN DESIRE RESTS
You know I’m looking at you
you know what I’m thinking
you know you’re interested
I am very skillful
you will forget that I am old
unless you want to remember it
unless you want to see
what happens to desire
how free it becomes
how shamelessly involved in love
for every woman
and her stockings.
When desire rests,
it is signaled by two people
faraway on a green blanket
(or is it the flowers of moss);
two people waving from a distance
stretched out like things
that have to dry
with tender smiles on their
little round faces;
waving at desire
as it rests in the foreground
foothill-shaped, peaceful,
devoted as a dog made of tears.
WHAT IS COMING 2.16.03
what is coming
ten million people
in the street
cannot stop
what is coming
the American Armed Forces
cannot control
the President
of the United States
and his counselors
cannot conceive
initiate
command
or direct
everything
you do
or refrain from doing
will bring us
to the same place
the place we don’t know
your anger against the war
your horror of death
your calm strategies
your bold plans
to rearrange
the middle east
to overthrow the dollar
to establish
the 4th Reich
to live forever
to silence the Jews
to order the cosmos
to tidy up your life
to improve religion
they count for nothing
you have no understanding
of the consequences
of what you do
oh and one more thing
you aren’t going to like
what comes after
America
WHAT I DO
It’s not that I like
to live in a hotel
in a place like India
and write about G-d
and run after women
It seems to be
what I do
SCHOOL DAYS
I headed the school
I was the school head
John was the arms
Peggy was the asshole
and Jennifer the toes.
I loved the asshole best.
In my striped football sweater
and in my v-neck hockey shirt
I was a sight.
No wonder Peggy fell
under my influence.
Until the accident.
Then I lost her.
Flags wave and banners ripple.
All is lost for the visiting team.
There I am in a bad seat
scowling at our victory.
I cannot take my eyes off
her little bouncing skirt.
I’m talking about the cheerleader
named Peggy.
That was forty-seven years ago.
The Past.
I never think about The Past
but sometimes
The Past thinks about me
and sits down
ever so lightly on my face—
And me and Peggy
and John and Jennifer,
our scarves in the wind,
we’re speeding
in the family roadster
to someone’s house
in Nantucket
and I can walk again.
THE FLOWERS HATE US
the flowers hate us
the animals pray for our death
as soon as i found out
i murdered my dog
now i knew what they were up to
the daisy the iris the rose
why there was no peace among men
why nothing worked
there is no going back
throw out your friend’s bouquet
kill the animals all of them
but don’t eat their meat
now that i know what they’re thinking
their sex organs in the air
their stinking fur
and their tug at the heart
what they would do to us if they won
how great it will be without them
just getting on with our short lives
which are longer than theirs
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