The Flame

by Leonard Cohen

  they stopped me in the subway

  I didn’t have my car

  make it easy baby

  the shit has got too hard

  make it easy baby

  and put my soul to rest

  I’ll even say I love you

  if it ain’t some kind of test

  make it easy baby

  don’t make the poor boy wait

  those subtle

  subtle invitations

  that often come too late

  if I had a gifted mind

  if I had a gifted tongue

  still I’d bitch & moan

  that I didn’t have enough

  that I caught too many colds

  that I spent a night alone

  if I were deep

  if I were bright

  if I could keep

  the Lord in sight

  if I didn’t have to ask

  if I knew my human task

  if I had a certain task

  if I could win The Purple Heart

  before the battle start

  don’t condemn

  anyone to death

  before you’ve had

  your coffee

  ***

  To lead a private life

  a lonely American marriage

  a song on the charts

  a house in Greece

  the best of drugs

  friendly with the maitre d’

  in three of four good restaurants

  donations to {the television picture}

  of a starving child

  a private life of exemplary elegance

  and humanity

  a vegetarian a Scientologist

  a patron of the latest revolution

  a private life with several ladies

  and a highly dependent wife

  whatever happened to my private life

  whatever happened to my suit of Harris Tweed

  and my long Aegean suntan

  whatever happened to my place

  in the Anthology of English Literature

  and here we are with no one but each other

  and the tear gas drifting through the trees

  and here we are without a family crest

  and here we are with plans to build a city

  and here we are with killers in our midst

  whom we love

  whom we depend on

  killers whom none of us can trust

  and it’s late and it’s early

  as all the experts say

  and all of us are amateurs

  in what we do today

  whatever happened to the private life

  the poets and the singers promised me

  To lead a private life

  like a pirate with his knife

  ***

  Paris March 1969

  If Kenneth Koch wasn’t so funny

  he’d have to carry a gun

  because he steals men’s wives

  and what is worse

  gives them back

  complete with assorted old jokes

  he tried to prevent me

  from discovering the whereabouts

  of Terry Southern’s ex-wife

  but conscience drove him

  to phone up the next day

  and apologize

  actually I phoned him

  and he apologized in passing

  I could have waited a long time

  for that phone-call

  ***

  Travelogue

  the {beefy} burghers of Montreal

  elude a humpty-dumpty fall

  by climbing not a single wall

  or hill or steps or stairs at all

  the stables of the King are bare

  and his soldiers couldn’t care—

  the beefy burghers do not dare

  to risk eternal disrepair

  they did not hear me when I fell

  and fractured all my mortal shell

  flutes of bone, fine flutes to sell

  a skull that rattles like a bell

  ***

  to the young let me say:

  I am not sage, rebbe, roshi, guru

  I am Bad Example.

  to experienced persons

  who have characterized my life work

  as cheap, superficial, pretentious, insignificant:

  you do not know

  how Right you are

  among the whores

  there are some of us

  who want to make love well

  and among {those} these

  a few

  who do it for nothing

  I am a whore

  and a junkie.

  if some of my songs

  made a moment

  easier for you,

  please remember this.

  ***

  I loved you. I envied you. I thought I had a

  right to your company. When that time came I

  wasted it in tales of strength and boasting. Your

  lovely light has guided me so long.

  Sometimes the light of a firefly, sometimes the light of a furnace.

  ***

  and when the ordeal

  that you know and you feel

  is truly refined and upheld

  we’ll meet in the house

  that’s prepared for the spouse

  of the widowed lord

  of us all

  ***

  I saw her comb her long black hair

  and then I loved her jealously

  I broke my life in two for her

  and she’s no good for me

  Her {full moon} breasts

  tipped rosy red

  O God I love her jealously

  She burns my heart she warms my bed

  & she’s no good for me

  ***

  We go down to the café

  on Mount Royal

  where they have the records of home

  and we spend our quarters to hear

  the songs that were born in the sun

  and we dance with a twisted handkerchief

  through the long nights of snow

  and for all the sweet time that a song can last

  back to the islands we go

  and soon they turn the juke-box off

  and there’s only five of us left

  and we’re done with the talking of politics

  and the beer is up to our necks

  we sing like we sang on the island

  when we’d sail up the moonlit steps

  and if you could look through the blizzard

  you’d see the blood on our lips

  Don’t forget me Demetra

  Don’t forget what you know

  I’ll be coming back with the money

  in fifteen years or so

  ***

  Karen’s beauty is very great

  it lies on her heart like a paperweight

  She haunts the edges of her beauty

  like a ghost on sentry duty

  If beauty is the motherland

  she lives on the furthest strand

  Her back toward the Capitol

  that the pilgrims call so beautiful

  She hears them make a joyous sound

  but she cannot turn around

  The lover’s song and the victim’s rack

  they soar and creak behind her back

  Through her beauty many pass

  like penitents on broken glass

  But once inside there is no cure

  for hearts so wounded at the door

  Trying to find a place to kneel

  between the poets of pain

  Trying to find a world to feel

  that feels like the world again

  My darling says her love is real

  then why does she complain

  ***

  You talk about telling me the truth and then you threaten to write all over my book of poems. Let us put an end to this chatter.

&nb
sp; You expressed some curiosity as to whether I would love you or kill you in response to one of your gestures. I am neither a saint nor a murderer: I do not love and I do not kill. I make love and I tear the wings off flies

  ***

  One more drink

  for the boys at the bar

  I’d tell you all about us

  but I don’t know who we are

  One more cry

  from the pedal steel guitar

  for the war that we lost

  for the girl that we wanted

  for the man that we double-crossed

  all day at the office

  for the scout from the major league

  who’s never gonna spot ya

  Get em up, Joe,

  like you did for Frank Sinatra

  ***

  August 2, 1976

  I stole your sister for a little ritual that failed

  I stole your savior with his hands so firmly nailed

  I stole the crescent moon its image in the sea

  I stole your roses and your lapis lazuli

  I stole the bullets made of silver and your gun

  I stole your many gods, I stole the only one

  I stole the tower with a woman leaning there

  I stole your lover from the ladder of her hair

  I crossed the line of reason

  I stole your victory handout

  and your flimsy Holocaust

  I stole the midnight special from the trash

  So go to sleep, it’s never coming back

  I stole your former wife, I had to tell her why

  you kept on coming back to say goodbye

  I crossed a moat, a high electric fence

  I stole your Jews and Gypsies tangled from the trench {tangled in a trench}

  I stole your victim [?] memory your holocaust

  I have stolen everything you lost

  ***

  For I have been thru many lives

  & no one follows me

  I am what you were last night

  & I am what you’ll be

  The moment that you track me down

  I surrender there

  I leave you with a bag of cracks

  that you know you must repair

  ***

  You came to me

  You wear your widow clothes

  I ask who are you mourning for

  you say, The man you were before

  The man you were before

  I loved you

  I remember him

  Didn’t he live

  on an island in

  the Mediterranean sea

  with a mandate from God

  to enter the dark

  Acceptance Address for the Prince of Asturias Award

  October 21, 2011

  Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Excellencies, Members of the Jury, Distinguished Laureates, Ladies and Gentlemen:

  It is a great honor to stand here before you tonight. Perhaps, like the great maestro Riccardo Muti, I am not used to standing in front of an audience without an orchestra behind me, but I will do my best as a solo artist tonight.

  I stayed up all night last night wondering what I might say to this august assembly. And after I had eaten all the chocolate bars and peanuts in the mini-bar, I scribbled a few words. I don’t think I have to refer to them. Obviously, I am deeply touched to be recognized by the Foundation. But I’ve come here tonight to express another dimension of gratitude. I think I can do it in three or four minutes—and I will try.

  When I was packing in Los Angeles to come here, I had a sense of unease because I’ve always felt some ambiguity about an award for poetry. Poetry comes from a place that no one commands and no one conquers. So I feel somewhat like a charlatan to accept an award for an activity which I do not command. In other words, if I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often.

  I was compelled in the midst of that ordeal of packing to go and open my guitar. I have a Conde guitar, which was made in Spain in the great workshop at Number 7 Gravina Street; a beautiful instrument that I acquired over 40 years ago. I took it out of the case and I lifted it. It seemed to be filled with helium—it was so light. And I brought it to my face. I put my face close to the beautifully designed rosette, and I inhaled the fragrance of the living wood. You know that wood never dies.

  I inhaled the fragrance of cedar as fresh as the first day that I acquired the guitar. And a voice seemed to say to me, “You are an old man and you have not said thank you; you have not brought your gratitude back to the soil from which this fragrance arose.” And so I come here tonight to thank the soil and the soul of this people that has given me so much—because I know just as an identity card is not a man, a credit rating is not a country. Now, you know of my deep association and confraternity with the poet Federico García Lorca. I could say that when I was a young man, an adolescent, and I hungered for a voice, I studied the English poets and I knew their work well, and I copied their styles, but I could not find a voice. It was only when I read, even in translation, the works of Lorca that I understood that there was a voice. It is not that I copied his voice; I would not dare. But he gave me permission to find a voice, to locate a voice; that is, to locate a self, a self that is not fixed, a self that struggles for its own existence.

  And as I grew older I understood that instructions came with this voice. What were these instructions? The instructions were never to lament casually. And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty.

  And so I had a voice, but I did not have an instrument. I did not have a song.

  And now I’m going to tell you very briefly a story of how I got my song.

  Because I was an indifferent guitar player. I banged the chords. I only knew a few of them. I sat around with my college friends, drinking and singing the folk songs, or the popular songs of the day, but I never in a thousand years thought of myself as a musician or as a singer.

  One day in the early ’60s, I was visiting my mother’s house in Montreal. The house is beside a park, and in the park there’s a tennis court where many people come to watch the beautiful young tennis players enjoy their sport. I wandered back to this park, which I’d known since my childhood, and there was a young man playing a guitar. He was playing a flamenco guitar, and he was surrounded by two or three girls and boys who were listening to him. I loved the way he played. There was something about the way he played that captured me.

  It was the way I wanted to play—and knew that I would never be able to play.

  And I sat there with the other listeners for a few moments, and when there was a silence, an appropriate silence, I asked him if he would give me guitar lessons. He was a young man from Spain, and we could only communicate in my broken French and his broken French. He didn’t speak English. And he agreed to give me guitar lessons. I pointed to my mother’s house, which you could see from the tennis court, and we made an appointment; we settled the price.

  And he came to my mother’s house the next day and he said, “Let me hear you play something.” I tried to play something. He said, “You don’t know how to play, do you?” I said, “No, I really don’t know how to play.” He said, “First of all, let me tune your guitar. It’s all out of tune.” So he took the guitar, and he tuned it. He said, “It’s not a bad guitar.” It wasn’t the Conde, but it wasn’t a bad guitar. So he handed it back to me. He said, “Now play.”

  I couldn’t play any better.

  He said, “Let me show you some chords.” And he took the guitar and he produced a sound from the guitar that I’d never heard. And he played a sequence of chords with a tremolo, and he said, “Now you do it.” I said, “It’s out of the question. I can’t possibly do it.” He said, “Let me put your fingers on the frets.” And he put my fingers on the frets. And he said, “Now, now play.” It was a mess. He said, “I’ll come back tomorrow.” He came back tomorrow. He put my hands
on the guitar. He placed it on my lap in the way that was appropriate, and I began again with those six chords—[the] six-chord progression that many, many flamenco songs are based on.

  I was a little better that day.

  The third day: improved, somewhat improved. But I knew the chords now. And I knew that although I couldn’t coordinate my fingers with my thumb to produce the correct tremolo pattern, I knew the chords—I knew them very, very well by this point. The next day, he didn’t come. He didn’t come. I had the number of his boarding house in Montreal. I phoned to find out why he had missed the appointment, and they told me that he’d taken his life—that he committed suicide. I knew nothing about the man. I did not know what part of Spain he came from. I did not know why he came to Montreal. I did not know why he stayed there. I did not know why he appeared there in that tennis court. I did not know why he took his life. I was deeply saddened, of course.

  But now I disclose something that I’ve never spoken in public. It was those six chords—it was that guitar pattern that has been the basis of all my songs and all my music.

  So now you will begin to understand the dimensions of the gratitude I have for this country. Everything that you have found favorable in my work comes from this place.

  Everything, everything that you have found favorable in my songs and my poetry is inspired by this soil.

  So I thank you so much for the warm hospitality that you have shown my work, because it is really yours, and you have allowed me to affix my signature to the bottom of the page.

  Thank you so much, ladies and gentlemen.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Leonard did not provide acknowledgements for The Flame, which is a minor tragedy, as the duty of fulfilling this obligation falls on me, and I am wholly inadequate to the task. The acknowledgements to Book of Longing demonstrate the importance which Leonard assigned to this page. Leonard’s humility was genuine, and his gratitude unmistakable. He would have been concerned about possible hurt feelings by anyone who felt overlooked, notwithstanding the inherent limitations in this exercise. That said, I am guided by simplicity.

  Leonard would have thanked Robert Faggen for his friendship and editorial efforts during the long process of assembling The Flame from Leonard’s extensive archive. Leonard would also have thanked Alexandra Pleshoyano, whom he first met in 2010, for her scholarly expertise and meticulous attention to detail in the final editing of the manuscript. He would also have thanked Jared Bland at McClelland and Stewart; Ileene Smith and Jonathan Galassi at Farrar, Straus and Giroux; and Francis Bickmore at Canongate for their commitment to the book, and his friend Leon Wieseltier for reading the final manuscript. He would also want me to thank his new agent, Andrew Wylie, for his efforts with this manuscript and for his work on the back catalogue.