Here's my Leonard Cohen cento, if anyone's interested
in reference-spotting amidst the language of
international finance:
Mise-en-tranche: A tribute song
_I haven't been this happy
Since the end of World War II_
(Leonard Cohen, "Waiting for the Miracle")
He loves the country but can't stand the trees
on the same grounds--real yet not exactly
_there_, like the World Bank--cypress sheer
madness where the wind has no currency
yet the sentimental willow goes on whining,
meaner than mildew to sour his leisure,
the pleasure of coming into his own
silk lining. Such a stitch to be talking to
his pockets at closing time. _Repent_, they said
but now he knows what everybody knows
they meant: the Sermon's on _account_,
beyond the mind to credit, like fiat money.
It's criminal, reversible as sonata or skin or
this torn trenchcoat indebted to the blues,
the rain a rhythm section tapping panic on
his lids. Drum him in then at the Great Event
along with that dove he bought and bought
again. Stranger Music, those rivers going crazy
over garbage in the harbor. He's a bodybag man
that time will not okay, whose workers in song
are still giving tongue just to get ahead of their
class.
So billet to the Left Bank when Manhattan's
given as Japan's taken; your man's been driven
from _Seven Pillars_ to postmodernism. What a
relief
to lie down at last with all he's lost, to kiss off
Berlin and its cheap violins now that he holds
every note torn from the sheets he never worked
alone, by the sweat of the moon or a dead
magazine. Let the limousine wait
in the street for last year's man to comfort
any widowed government. He used to live
on loan himself, where Malibu verges on absurdity.
The bonds he bears now he wears as bracelets,
like a refugee entrenched in foreign issue. He's
divested, optioned, rhapsodic with his treasury
of merits, history's indulgence a dated unhappi-
ness: Nancy's phone open since '61; Suzanne
sold down the river in '67; Marianne, so long gone
now with the famous raincoat. Will he ever get clear
of their .45s and razor blades, their dresses,
their asses? Love coldly slips from hyacinth to
barbiturate, like verses for faces lined and powdered
by the same bitter mirror; the river's
answer, he guesses, to the cut of his coke and
his times. If there's hell still to pay for all that
croc
DNA once the fiddler's stopped fundamentally,
he says he can't complain. As beauty's his
witness to the falling rate of prime, he's never
been so postwar nor felt so good since
his bird wired cash from Bretton Woods.
(c) Candice Ward, 2006, and _Jacket Magazine_
--- MC Ward <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Barry,
>
> I use it, too, in a tribute to Cohen, a poem that
> has
> many references to titles and lyrics. Here's the
> section where "Everybody Knows" occurs:
>
> ... Such a stitch to be talking to
> his pockets at closing time. _Repent,_ they said
> but now he knows what everybody knows
> they meant: the Sermon's on _account_ ....
>
>
> "Closing Time" is a song title, too. The Sermon on
> the
> Mount/on account, he says he doesn't understand.
>
> Candice
>
>
>
>
>
>
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