Book of Mercy

Leonard Cohen

• Publisher: Canongate Canons
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781786896865
• eBook ISBN: 9781786896872
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

The poems in Book of Mercy brim with praise, despair, anger, doubt and trust. Speaking from the heart of the modern world, yet in tones that resonate with an older devotional tradition, these verses give voice to our deepest, most powerful intuitions.

Internationally celebrated for his writing and his music, Leonard Cohen is revered as one of the greatest writers, performers, and most consistently daring artists of the last hundred years.

I

1

I STOPPED TO LISTEN, BUT he did not come. I began again with a sense of loss. As this sense deepened I heard him again. I stopped stopping and I stopped starting, and I allowed myself to be crushed by ignorance. This was a strategy, and didn’t work at all. Much time, years, were wasted in such a minor mode. I bargain now. I offer buttons for his love. I beg for mercy. Slowly he yields. Haltingly he moves toward his throne. Reluctantly the angels grant to one another permission to sing. In a transition so delicate it cannot be marked, the court is established on beams of golden symmetry, and once again I am a singer in the lower choirs, born fifty years ago to raise my voice this high, and no higher.

2

WHEN I LEFT THE KING I began to rehearse what I would say to the world: long rehearsals full of revisions, imaginary applause, humiliations, edicts of revenge. I grew swollen as I conspired with my ambition, I struggled, I expanded, and when the term was up, I gave birth to an ape. After some small inevitable misunderstanding, the ape turned on me. Limping, stumbling, I fled back to the swept courtyards of the king. ‘Where is your ape?’ the king demanded. ‘Bring me your ape.’ The work is slow. The ape is old. He clowns behind his bars, imitating our hands in the dream. He winks at my official sense of urgency. What king, he wants to know. What courtyard? What highway?

3

I HEARD MY SOUL SINGING behind a leaf, plucked the leaf, but then I heard it singing behind a veil. I tore the veil, but then I heard it singing behind a wall. I broke the wall, and I heard my soul singing against me. I built up the wall, mended the curtain, but I could not put back the leaf. I held it in my hand and I heard my soul singing mightily against me. This is what it’s like to study without a friend.

4

AFTER SEARCHING AMONG the words, and never finding ease, I went to you, I asked you to gladden my heart. My prayer divided against itself, I was ashamed to have been deceived again, and bitterly, in the midst of loud defeat, I went out myself to gladden the heart. It was here that I found my will, a fragile thing, starving among ferns and women and snakes. I said to my will, ‘Come, let us make ourselves ready to be touched by the angel of song,’ and suddenly I was once again on the bed of defeat in the middle of the night, begging for mercy, searching among the words. With the two shields of bitterness and hope, I rose up carefully, and I went out of the house to rescue the angel of song from the place where she had chained herself to her nakedness. I covered her nakedness with my will, and we stood in the kingdom that shines toward you, where Adam is mysteriously free, and I searched among the words for words that would not bend the will away from you.

5

‘LET ME REST,’ HE CRIED from the panic at the top of his heap of days. ‘Let me rest on the day of rest,’ he entreated from the throne of unemployment. ‘This king is heavy in my arms, I can’t hold up the Pharaoh any more.’ He fastened his collar to the darkness so he couldn’t breathe, and he opened the book in anger to make his payment to the law. An angel, who had no intrinsic authority, said, ‘You have sealed every gate but this one; therefore, here is a little light commensurate with your little courage.’ His shame climbed up itself to find a height from which to spill. Then there was a sweeter saying in a stiller voice: ‘I do not put my trust in man, nor do I place reliance on an angel.’ Immediately the Torah sang to him, and touched his hair, and for a moment, as a gift to serve his oldest memory, he wore the weightless crown, the crown that lifts the weight away, he wore it till his heart could say, ‘How precious is the heritage!’ The crown that leaps up from the letters, a crown like dew that gives the grass to drink beads out of the darkness, the mother’s kiss at the beginning of the war, the father’s hand that lets the forehead shine, the crown that raises up no man a king above his company. ‘Lead me deep into your Sabbath, let me sit beneath the mighty ones whom you have crowned forever, and let me study how they rest.’

6

SIT DOWN, MASTER, ON this rude chair of praises, and rule my nervous heart with your great decrees of freedom. Out of time you have taken me to do my daily task. Out of mist and dust you have fashioned me to know the numberless worlds between the crown and the kingdom. In utter defeat I came to you and you received me with a sweetness I had not dared to remember. Tonight I come to you again, soiled by strategies and trapped in the loneliness of my tiny domain. Establish your law in this walled place. Let nine men come to lift me into their prayer so that I may whisper with them: Blessed be the name of the glory of the kingdom forever and forever.

7

I PUSHED MY BODY FROM one city to another, one rooftop to another, to see a woman bathing. I heard myself grunt. I saw my fingers glisten. Then the exile closed around me. Then the punishment began; a small aimless misery, not in the heart, in the throat, then the removal of the body, the birds singing to a treasure of garbage, then world amnesia, a ghost bathing and shitting. Then I ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Also by Leonard Cohen
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• I
• II
• Index of Opening Phrases