Travel - Leonard Cohen

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

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
    Halfway 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.

      --Leonard Cohen

Comments

[con-grazia.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this. I love him, and actually have this poem in a first edition hardcover of his poetry book. No one is quite like Leonard Cohen.

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

Ah, which book would that be? I got this from "Stranger Music"

./w

[con-grazia.livejournal.com]

It's from "The Spice Box of Earth," 1st Edition, 1961. If you read this entry in my LJ, I just found out recently that my aunt worked for his father when Leonard was just a young boy:
http://con-grazia.livejournal.com/32152.html

Also, another of my favorite poems from the above book:

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 wter
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.

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

Wow, that was an amazing post. Unbelievable having someone like your Aunt in your immediate family.

I have all the books by Cohen, including the Spice Box. I loved this poem the moment I read it. Thank you.

./w

[con-grazia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think if you read my next entry, maybe - can't quite remember - she talks a bit more about it and also about meeting Christopher Plummer when he was a young man.

I'll tell you - my aunt is such an amazing woman, those guys should be honored that THEY met HER! She's phenomenal. :)