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Leonard Cohen - The Spice-Box of Earth

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Contents
Original edition copyright Leonard Cohen 1961 First McClelland Stewart - photo 1
Original edition copyright Leonard Cohen 1961 First McClelland Stewart - photo 2
Original edition copyright Leonard Cohen, 1961 First McClelland & Stewart edition 1961. This edition 2018. All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisheror, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agencyis an infringement of the copyright law. McClelland & Stewart and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Cohen, Leonard, 1934-2016, author The spice-box of earth / Leonard Cohen. Poems. Poems.

Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 9780771024566 (softcover).ISBN 9780771024573 (EPUB) I. Title. PS8505.O22L4 2018 C811.54 C2018-901600-0 C2018-901601-9 Acknowledgements to the Canadian Broadcasting Company, The Queens Quarterly, Prism, Saturday Review, Pan-ic, the McGill Chapbook, and Tamarack Review. Money from the Canada Council bought me time to complete this book and other books. I wish to thank all those concerned.

Book design by Five Seventeen McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

v532 a This title contains long lines of poetry The line of characters below - photo 3
v5.3.2 a This title contains long lines of poetry. The line of characters below indicates approximately the longest line in the text: as you wonder how many multitudes are lying beside your body, To most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the printed page, you may choose to decrease the size of the text on your viewer and/or change the orientation of your screen until the above line of characters fits on a single line. This may not be possible on all e-reading devices. Viewing this title at a higher than optimal text size or on a screen too small to accommodate the longest lines in the text will alter the reading experience and may cause single lines of some poems to display as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent. This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandmother MRS LYON COHEN and to the memory of my grandfather RABBI SOLOMON KLINITSKY
Contents
A KITE IS A VICTIM
A kite is a victim you are sure of.

You love it because it pulls gentle enough to call you master, strong enough to call you fool; because it lives like a desperate trained falcon in the high sweet air, and you can always haul it down to tame it in your drawer. A kite is a fish you have already caught in a pool where no fish come, so you play him carefully and long, and hope he wont give up, or the wind die down. A kite is the last poem youve written, so you give it to the wind, but you dont let it go until someone finds you something else to do. A kite is a contract of glory that must be made with the sun, so you make friends with the field the river and the wind, then you pray the whole cold night before, under the travelling cordless moon, to make you worthy and lyric and pure.

AFTER THE SABBATH PRAYERS
After the Sabbath prayers The Baal Shems butterfly Followed me down the hill. Now the Baal Shem is dead These hundreds of years And a butterfly ends its life In three flag-swept days.

So this was a miracle, Dancing down all these wars and truces Yellow as a first-day butterfly, Nothing of time or massacre In its bright flutter. Now the sharp stars are in the sky And I am shivering as I did last night, And the wind is not warmer For the yellow butterfly Folded somewhere on a sticky leaf And moving like a leaf itself. And how truly great A miracle this is, that I, Who this morning saw the Baal Shems butterfly Doing its glory in the sun, Should spend this night in darkness, Hands pocketed against the flies and cold.

GIFT
You tell me that silence is nearer to peace than poems but if for my gift I brought you silence (for I know silence) you would say This is not silencethis is another poem and you would hand it back to me.
THE FLOWERS THAT I LEFT IN THE GROUND
The flowers that I left in the ground, that I did not gather for you, today I bring them all back, to let them grow forever, not in poems or marble, but where they fell and rotted. And the ships in their great stalls, huge and transitory as heroes, ships I could not captain, today I bring them back to let them sail forever, not in model or ballad, but where they were wrecked and scuttled.

And the child on whose shoulders I stand, whose longing I purged with public, kingly discipline, today I bring him back to languish forever, not in confession or biography, but where he flourished, growing sly and hairy. It is not malice that draws me away, draws me to renunciation, betrayal: it is weariness, I go for weariness of thee. Gold, ivory, flesh, love, G-d, blood, moon I have become the expert of the catalogue. My body once so familiar with glory, my body has become a museum: this part remembered because of someones mouth, this because of a hand, this of wetness, this of heat. Who owns anything he has not made? With your beauty I am as uninvolved as with horses manes and waterfalls. This is my last catalogue.

I breathe the breathless I love you, I love you and let you move forever.

IF IT WERE SPRING
If it were Spring and I killed a man, I would change him to leaves and hang him from a tree, a tree in a grove at the edge of a dune, where small beasts came to flee the sun. Wind would make him part of song, and rain would cling like tiny crystal worlds upon his branch of leaf-green skies, and he would bear the dance of fragile bone, brush of wings against his maps of arteries, and turn up a yellow-stomached flag to herald the touring storm. O my victim, you would grow your season as I grew mine, under the spell of growth, an instrument of the blue sky, an instrument of the sun, a palm above the dark, splendid eyes. What language the city will hear because of your death, anguish explain, sorrow relieve. Everywhere I see the world waiting you, the pens raised, walls prepared, hands hung above the strings and keys.

And come Autumn I will spin a net between your height and earth to hold your crisp parts. In the fields and orchards it must be turning Spring, look at the faces clustered around mine. And I hear the irrefutable argument of hunger whispered, spoken, shouted, but never sung. I will kill a man this week; before this week is gone I will hang him to a tree, I will see this mercy done.

THERE ARE SOME MEN
There are some men who should have mountains to bear their names to time. Grave-markers are not high enough or green, and sons go far away to lose the fist their fathers hand will always seem.

I had a friend: he lived and died in mighty silence and with dignity, left no book, son, or lover to mourn. Nor is this a mourning-song but only a naming of this mountain on which I walk, fragrant, dark, and softly white under the pale of mist. I name this mountain after him.

YOU ALL IN WHITE
Whatever cities are brought down, I will always bring you poems, and the fruit of orchards I pass by. Strangers in your bed, excluded by our grief, listening to sleep-whispering, will hear their passion beautifully explained, and weep because they cannot kiss your distant face. Lovers of my beloved, watch how my words put on her lips like clothes, how they wear her body like a rare shawl.
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