I like it, Candice. Funny how Cohen's often traditional (looking)
lyrics provoke something else in others.
I have done two, one far too long, but I'll show the other here (from
Breath Takes).
Doug
On 5-Jul-07, at 5:22 AM, MC Ward wrote:
> 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")
W[H]earing it.
Fragmented memories.
I know the song well & for me it always
had that end of December feeling,
a way of writing you now, singing the
good times as well as the bad. I also wore a
raincoat in New York’s cold or anywhere I’m living.
Then there’s music meant to last all thru the evening,
a slow orgasm of tears deep in the desert of song. I never could
afford a
Burberry but he could, or did, the proceeds of some kind of record
I bought (& later the CD I’m listening to this moment), & you did too.
I
got it – the joke, the book, the song’s contrapuntal ironies
in those doubled words he didn’t need to go to
London to learn. Now you, I, even he
in all his fame & glory, look so much older than in
Because we are.
It seems to be a way of slipping the self, that ego
hung out through the open window (flung out), ironically the
more he escaped the more he was trapped
heroically going to the station to meet every train
when not one would take him far enough away from
I. Who changed his face so often,
took pains to hide, yet always came back
out from the monastery, the recording studio,
the little house on Hydra. In Paris,
lining the streets outside L’Olympia
and cheering for the 23rd encore, the beast
achieved critical mass and gave him the
glory he insisted he refused to seek.
When later that voice goes lower
the lines refuse the easy rhyme just for the
frayed moment: raincoat, Jane, you, & the
sleeves torn at the shoulder
were part of the guesswork, loss, forgiveness, all
repaired like the coat. The enemy sleeping now
with your woman (Jane?) may be
a taste of the trouble you took from her eyes, some
little lock of hair for remembrance, the black
leather coat that replaced that famous blue one finally.
Things tend downwards, hard days turn worse. Those
were the days, the nights, the voice more or less
clear. Enough for poetry and song.
I mostly listen to others now, those tough women, but
knew those lyrics well &
how the lyric lies in wait
to catch the imagination still,
dress it up
in identification, or at least overhearing
those sly come-ons we still believed in the
days before we took Berlin.
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
Latest book: Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
You may allow me moments
not monuments, I being
content. It is little,
but it is little enough.
John Newlove
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