Home > Work > Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs
1 " And I'll dance with you in Vienna,I'll be wearing a river's disguise.The hyacinth wild on my shouldermy mouth on the dew of your thighs.And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook,with the photographs there and the moss.And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty,my cheap violin and my cross. "
― Leonard Cohen , Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs
2 " A heavy burden lifted from my soul,I heard that love was out of my control. "
3 " It’s a pity if someone… has to console himself for the wreck of his days with the notion that somehow his voice, his work embodies the deepest, most obscure, freshest, rawest oyster of reality in the unfathomable refrigerator of the heart’s ocean, but I am such a one, and there you have it. "
4 " It is in love that we are made, in love we disappear. "
5 " Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river You can hear the boats go by You can spend the night beside her And you know that she's half crazy But that's why you want to be there And she feeds you tea and oranges That come all the way from China And just when you mean to tell her That you have no love to give her Then she gets you on her wavelength And she lets the river answer "
6 " TRAVEL Loving you, flesh to flesh, I often thought Of travelling penniless to some mud throne Where a master might instruct me how to plot My life away from pain, to love alone In the bruiseless embrace of stone and lake. Lost in the fields of your hair I was never lost Enough to lose a way I had to take; Breathless beside your body I could not exhaust The will that forbid me contract, vow, Or promise, and often while you slept I looked in awe beyond your beauty. Now I know why many men have stopped and wept Halfway between the loves they leave and seek, And wondered if travel leads them anywhere — Horizons keep the soft line of your cheek, The windy sky’s a locket for your hair. "
7 " 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 "
8 " AS THE MIST LEAVES NO SCAR As the mist leaves no scar On the dark green hill, So my body leaves no scar On you, nor ever will. When wind and hawk encounter, What remains to keep? So you and I encounter, Then turn, then fall to sleep. As many nights endure Without a moon or star, So will we endure When one is gone and far. "
9 " TAKE THIS LONGING "
