Flowers for Hitler
•
A NOTE ON THE TITLE
A
while ago
this book would
have been called
SUNSHINE FOR NAPOLEON,
and earlier still it
would have been
called
WALLS FOR GENGHIS KHAN
© COPYRIGHT
Leonard Cohen, 1964
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper.
eISBN: 978-1-55199-499-4
The Canadian Publishers
McClelland and Stewart Limited
25 Hollinger Road, Toronto 16
DESIGN: F. NEWFELD
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
What I’m Doing Here
The Hearth
Portrait of the City Hall
Congratulations
The Drawer’s Condition on November 28, 1961
The Suit
Business as Usual
Indictment of the Blue Hole
Nothing I Can Lose
Police Gazette
No Partners
On the Death of an Uncharted Planet
I Wanted to Be a Doctor
On Hearing a Name Long Unspoken
Finally I Called
Style
Goebbels Abandons His Novel and Joins the Party
Why Commands Are Obeyed
It Uses Us!
The First Murder
My Teacher is Dying
Montreal 1964
Why Experience Is No Teacher
For My Old Layton
The Only Tourist in Havana Turns His Thoughts Homeward
The Invisible Trouble
Sick Alone
Millennium
Hitler the Brain-Mole
Death of a Leader
Alexander Trocchi, Public Junkie, Priez Pour Nous
Three Good Nights
To a Man Who Thinks He Is Making an Angel
On the Sickness of My Love
Cruel Baby
For Marianne
The Failure of a Secular Life
My Mentors
Hydra 1960
Leviathan
Heirloom
Promise
Sky
Waiting for Marianne
Why I Happen to Be Free
The True Desire
The Way Back
The Project
Hydra 1963
All There Is to Know about Adolph Eichmann
The New Leader
How It Happened in the Middle of the Day
For E.J.P.
The Glass Dog
A Migrating Dialogue
The Bus
Laundry
The Rest Is Dross
How the Winter Gets In
Propaganda
Opium and Hitler
For Anyone Dressed in Marble
Wheels, Fireclouds
Folk
I Had It for a Moment
Island Bulletin
Independence
The House
Order
Destiny
Queen Victoria and Me
The Pure List and the Commentary
The New Step (A Ballet-Drama in One Act)
The Paper
Nursery Rhyme
Old Dialogue
Winter Bulletin
Why Did You Give My Name to the Police?
Governments Make Me Lonely
The Lists
To the Indian Pilgrims
The Music Crept By Us
The Telephone
Disguises
Lot
One of the Nights I Didn’t Kill Myself
The Big World
Narcissus
Cherry Orchards
Streetcars
Bullets
Hitler
Front Lawn
Kerensky
Another Night with Telescope
FOR MARIANNE
If from the inside of the Lager, a message could have seeped out to free men, it would have been this: Take care not to suffer in your own homes what is inflicted on us here.
PRIMO LEVI
WHAT I’M DOING HERE
I do not know if the world has lied
I have lied
I do not know if the world has conspired against love
I have conspired against love
The atmosphere of torture is no comfort
I have tortured
Even without the mushroom cloud
still I would have hated
Listen
I would have done the same things
even if there were no death
I will not be held like a drunkard
under the cold tap of facts
I refuse the universal alibi
Like an empty telephone booth passed at night
and remembered
like mirrors in a movie palace lobby consulted
only on the way out
like a nymphomaniac who binds a thousand
into strange brotherhood
I wait
for each one of you to confess
THE HEARTH
The day wasn’t exactly my own
since I checked
and found it on a public calendar.
Tripping over many pairs of legs
as I walked down the park
I also learned my lust
was not so rare a masterpiece.
Buildings actually built
wars planned with blood and fought
men who rose to generals
deserved an honest thought
as I walked down the park.
I came back quietly to your house
which has a place on a street.
Not a single other house
disappeared when I came back.
You said some suffering
had taught me that.
I’m slow to learn I began
to speak of stars and hurricanes.
Come here little Galileo –
you undressed my vision –
it’s happier and easier by far
or cities wouldn’t be so big.
Later you worked over lace
and I numbered many things
your fingers and all fingers did.
As if to pay me a sweet
for my ardour on the rug
you wondered in the middle of a stitch:
Now what about those stars and hurricanes?
PORTRAIT OF THE CITY HALL
The diamonds of guilt
The scrolls of guilt
The pillars of guilt
The colours of guilt
The flags of guilt
The gargoyles of guilt
The spines of guilt
Listen, says the mayor, listen to the woodland birds.
They are singing like men in chains.
CONGRATULATIONS
Here we are eating the sacred mushrooms
out of the Japanese heaven
eating the flower
in the sands of Nevada
Hey Marco Polo
and you Arthur Rimbaud
friends of the sailing craft
examine our time’s adventure
the jewelled house of Dachau
Belsen’s drunk fraternity
Don’t your boats seem
like floating violins
playing Jack Benny tunes?
THE DRAWER’S CONDITION
ON NOVEMBER 28, 1961
Is there anything emptier
than the drawer where
you used to store your opium?
How like a blackeyed susan
blinded into ordinary daisy
is my pretty kitchen drawer!
How like a nose sans nostrils
is my bare wooden drawer!
How like an eggless basket!
How like a pool sans tortoise!
My hand has explored
my drawer like a rat
in an experiment of mazes.
Reader, I may safely say
there’s not an emptier drawer
in all of Christendom!
THE SUIT
I am locked in a very expensive suit
old elegant and enduring
Only my hair has been able to get free
but someone has been leaving
their dandruff in it
Now I will tell you
all there is to know about optimism
Each day in hub cap mirror
in soup reflection
in other people’s spectacles
I check my hair
for an army of alpinists
for Indian rope trick masters
for tangled aviators
for dove and albatross
for insect suicides
for abominable snowmen
I check my hair
for aerialists of every kind
Dedicated as an automatic elevator
I comb my hair for possibilities
I stick my neck out
I lean illegally from locomotive windows
and only for the barber
do I wear a hat
BUSINESS AS USUAL
The gold roof of Parliament covered
with fingerprints and scratches.
And here are the elected, hunchbacked
from climbing on each other’s heads.
The most precious secret has been leaked:
There is no Opposition!
Over-zealous hacks hoist the P.M.
through the ceiling. He fools
an entire sled-load of Miss Canada losers
by acting like a gargoyle.
Some fool (how did he get in) who
wants jobs for everyone and says
so in French is quickly interred
under a choice piece of the cornice
and likes it. (STAG PARTY LAUGHTER)
When are they going to show the dirty movie?
Don’t cry, Miss Canada,
it’s not as though the country’s
in their hands.
And next year we’re piping in
Congressional proceedings
direct from Washington –
all they’ll have to do
is make divorces.
INDICTMENT OF THE BLUE HOLE
January 28 1962
You must have heard me tonight
I mentioned you 800 times
January 28 1962
My abandoned narcotics have
abandoned me
January 28 1962
7:30 must have dug its
pikes into your blue wrist
January 28 1962
I shoved the transistor up my ear
And putting down
3 loaves of suicide (?)
2 razorblade pies
1 De Quincey hairnet
5-gasfillcd Hampstcad bedsitters (sic)
a collection of oil
2 eyelash garottes (sic)
6 lysol eye foods
he said with considerable charm and travail:
Is this all I give?
One lousy reprieve
at 2 in the morning?
This?
I’d rather have a job.
NOTHING I CAN LOSE
When I left my father’s house
the sun was halfway up,
my father held it to my chin
like a buttercup.
My father was a snake oil man
a wizard, trickster, liar,
but this was his best trick,
we kissed goodbye in fire.
A mile above Niagara Falls
a dove gave me the news
of his death. I didn’t miss a step,
there’s nothing I can lose.
Tomorrow I’ll invent a trick
I do not know tonight,
the wind, the pole will tell me what
and the friendly blinding light.
POLICE GAZETTE
My grandfather slams the silver goblet down.
He clears a silence
in the family talk
to comment on the wine.
It’s hot. Jesus is dying of heat.
There he lies on the wall
of the sordid courtroom
trying to get air into his armpits.
Judge runs a finger
between neck and collar –
hands the sentence down.
Love me this first day of June.
I’d rather sleep with ashes
than priestly wisdom.
Of all the lonely places in the world
this is best
where debris is human.
I kiss the precious ashes
that fall from fiery flesh.
On these familiar shapes
I lay my kisses down.
Hitler is alive.
He is fourteen years old.
He does not shave.
He wants to be an architect.
The first star tonight
insanely high, virgin, calm.
I have one hour of peace
before the documented planets
burn me down.
NO PARTNERS
dancer! cut them with your yellow hair
jawbone of silk slash them down
trouser slices lapel fragments suit debris
heaped with choppedup stumblers
beneath her grapewhite piston feet
She was hardly leaping, almost stilled by all the power in her, shoulders raised, calling in everything, her elbows pressing it into her stomach. She was a single spindle in the centre of a cobweb, gathering, growing, winding us all into particles of her supreme flesh.
She barely moved but her body screamed out motion. Her feet barely struck and lifted, almost stilled by all the power in her. Her shoulders were raised, forward, calling in everything, her elbows pressing it into her belly, fingers getting the tidbits, gathering, growing, winding us all into particles of her supreme flesh, And when we’d begone she would be in the
centre of some vast room
shimmering enormous at rest
ON THE DEATH OF AN UNCHARTED PLANET
Bilesmell in my room
Too cold to open the window
Lying on my bed
Hand over mouth
Didn’t dare speak
Out of razorblades
New pimples
When suddenly
I knew it died
Clean blazing death
So bright
So irrelevant
Puff it went
Ten times the
Weight of the world
Lost to nobody
New meteors
New collisions
What comfort
At my stomach gnawed
The divine emptiness
I ate
The dirty dishes
I squeezed my face
Fat and full
Free as a bullet
I did pushups
On the 11th story
Clean blazing death
So bright
So irrelevant
Who wouldn’t
Laugh himself
Into monstrous health
Just noticing it
I WANTED TO BE A DOCTOR
The famous doctor held up Grandma’s stomach.
Cancer! Cancer
! he cried out.
The theatre was brought low.
None of the internes thought about ambition.
Cancer! They all looked the other way.
They thought Cancer would leap out
and get them. They hated to be near.
This happened in Vilna in the Medical School.
Nobody could sit still.
They might be sitting beside Cancer.
Cancer was present.
Cancer had been let out of its bottle.
I was looking in the skylight.
I wanted to be a doctor.
All the internes ran outside.
The famous doctor held on to the stomach.
He was alone with Cancer.
Cancer! Cancer! Cancer!
He didn’t care who heard or didn’t hear.
It was his 87th Cancer.
ON HEARING A NAME LONG UNSPOKEN
Listen to the stories
men tell of last year
that sound of other places
though they happened here
Listen to a name
so private it can burn
hear it said aloud
and learn and learn
History is a needle
for putting men asleep
anointed with the poison
of all they want to keep
Now a name that saved you
has a foreign taste
claims a foreign body
froze in last year’s waste
And what is living lingers
while monuments are built
then yields its final whisper
to letters raised in gilt
But cries of stifled ripeness
whip me to my knees
I am with the falling snow
falling in the seas
I am with the hunters
hungry and shrewd
and I am with the hunted
quick and soft and nude
I am with the houses
that wash away in rain
and leave no teeth of pillars
to rake them up again
Let men numb names
scratch winds that blow
listen to the stories
but what you know you know
Flowers for Hitler Page 1