It is all around me, the darkness. You are my only shield. Your name is my only light. What love I have, your law is the source, this dead love that remembers only its name, yet the name is enough to open itself like a mouth, to call down the dew, and drink. O dead name that through your mercy speaks to the living name, mercy harkening to the will that is bent toward it, the will whose strength is its pledge to you – O name of love, draw down the blessing of completion on the man whom you have cut in half to know you.
Leonard Cohen, Book of Mercy, 37
Author: Brian
Leonard Cohen, Book of Mercy, 41
I look far, I forget you, and I’m lost. I lift my hands to you. I kneel toward my heart. I have no other home. My love is here. I end the day in mercy that I wasted in despair. Bind me to you, I fall away. Bind me, ease of my heart, bind me to your love. Gentle things you return to me, and duties that are sweet. And you say, I am in this heart, I and my name are here. Everywhere the blades turn, in every thought the butchery, and it is raw where I wander; but you hide me in the shelter of your name, and you open the hardness to tears. The drifting is to you, and the swell of suffering breaks toward you. You draw me back to close my eyes, to bless your name in speechlessness. Blessed are you in the smallness of your whispering. Blessed are you, who speaks to the unworthy.
LEONARD COHEN, BOOK OF MERCY, 41
Leonard Cohen, Book of Mercy, 12
I draw aside the curtain. You mock us with the beauty of your world. My heart hates the trees, the wind moving the branches, the dead diamond machinery of the sky. I pace the corridor between my teeth and my bladder, angry, murderous, comforted by the smell of my sweat. I weakened myself in your name. In my own eyes I disgraced myself for trusting you, against all evidence, against the prevailing winds of horror, over the bully’s laughter, the torturer’s loyalty, the sweet questions of the sly. Find me here, you whom David found in hell. The skeletons are waiting for your famous mechanical salvation. Swim through the blood, father of mercy. Broadcast your light through the apple of pain, radiant, sourceless, source of light. I wait for you, king of the dead, here in this garden where you placed me, beside the poisonous grass, miasmal homesteads, black Hebrew gibberish of pruned grapevines. I wait for you in the springtime of beatings and unnecessary death. Direct me out of this, O magnet of the falling cherry petals. Make a truce between my disgust and the impeccable landscape of fields and milky towns. Crush my swollen smallness, infiltrate my shame. Broken in the employment of my soul, I have driven a wedge into your world, fallen on both sides of it. Count me back to your mercy with the measures of a bitter song, and do not separate me from my tears.
Leonard Cohen, Book of Mercy, 12
Fierce Times
These are fierce times for those in chains, as well as for those called free. Go outside while dawn is still a passing rumor. Close your eyes and pay attention. It is not difficult to sense the intensity at the heart of the moment. You listen for the rebuttal, but you hear only the silent verdict, and the gavel slammed. You look for someone who loves you to raise an objection, but you don’t hold out much hope. Blindfolded and strapped to the condemned man’s seat, you cannot see the masked phantom woman tasked with your sentencing. Inwardly you plead more fervently than you ever have, that you might feel and know the unwavering presence of your Creator, but you feel only the tightening chains around your wrists as she stands you up, binds your hands behind your back, and drags you up the stone-strewn hill to your execution. Your crime, she tells you, was failure to yield to the real, to surrender your despair in her field where all cares disappear.
Troublesome Times
These are troublesome times for coupled-in and singled out alike. How can I uncover my union with God and the other in this unrelenting solitude? How can she recover her heaven-sent solitude with God through earth-bound union with the other? I would rather have her here to hold and comfort me on this last cold morning of November, and in the many cold mornings to come. Instead, I have only this stubborn wood that has caught fire, finally. But I am not comforted. I am bundled but buffeted. I walk outside and feel the wind rushing in; it cuts through my many threadbare coats to the raw skin.
What is real?
What is real? What is real is I have steeled myself against Life, and now nothing alive can get in, and nothing alive can get out.
What is real is Mother Nature abhors a vacuum, and so I have become abhorrent to her, and what can I do but buckle under the weight of her hatred. Who can I be but my tainted double, who huddles in the corner I’ve painted myself in.` Who among the cornered wouldn’t call it a blessing to be turned to dust by such an untouched divinity. Who divides the land from the sea. Who clamps this powerless body onto the rack of Time and shoves the wooden frame into the straightjacket of straightforward decay. Who surveys with indifference this chamber of tortured diffidence, within which I feel more like these stone walls each passing day.
What is real? If I become cemented within these cemented stone walls, if I become hard and demented and silent like you, guarded and impenetrable and violent like you, will you love me then? If what I make with this pen gives you glory, though I myself feel no joy in what I have done, will you love me then? Blend me into your beauty. I want to be inside you. I want to be inside my experience inside you. I want to stop this lie I am trying so hard to make true, but I do not know how to slide through my fenced self and arrive, undefended, onto the vast plain within me that embraces you. I want to make this aching stop forever, and I want to let it make me new. I want and want forever, until my wanting is my only reason for being. I want to hear from you.
But what is real is I am tied too tightly to the way I feel to hear the truth that abides beyond thought and feeling. I am gripping the wheel with all my strength, but the ship is anchored to the shore. All a man can do, who is not free to be, is pace like that poet’s panther inside its cell, where it has steeled itself against what its life has become. Nothing alive can get in, and nothing alive can get out.
Trying Times
These are trying times
for the accusers and the accused alike.
We act as if we could choose
to play the tyrant now
and his servant later,
but we are all always subject.
We all get roped in time,
tied in knots, hung-up
on gallows of disdain,
in shallow dungeons,
bereft, unhinged, no one left
to blame.
Last Morning of November
It is the last morning of November. I wake at four to a cold house. Time to start the fire. The wood takes a long time to catch, and it takes me no time to grow impatient. Self-accusation begins at once, and the accused is guilty until proven innocent. How can you be so incapable? How, after hundreds of times starting fires, can you still struggle to accomplish the task this morning? The accused is in his own movie, the main and only defendant in a staged trial by fire, but try as he might he cannot get the wood hot enough to be tried. The case is neither well received nor poorly received by the jury. There is no jury, and there are no witnesses. No one else sits in this theatre of the absurd to watch this film on repeat reel. There is no reception; there was never a wedding; there will be no consummation.
Haiku 2.1.20
Stillness, receive me
Here, and hold my fear, my care.
Hear my plea, my prayer.
Haiku 12.31.19
Bow down to bowed nights.
Brave days of towering need.
Cede the Sower seed.
Brian Leibold 