poetry – …Theresa Kishkan

This morning I’ve been thinking of Leonard Cohen, listening to a few songs (though I can’t bear to hear this one), musing about the passing of time, how some days it seems that I am still that 16 year old girl hearing him sing in Victoria, in a small theatre, and wondering where the years go. This is a repost from November, 2016.

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I remember hearing Leonard Cohen’s songs for the first time. I was in grade ten so it must have been 1970. I’d already discovered his poetry. The first poem I memorized, took to my heart, was his “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 father’s 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.

And the songs, oh, those songs. I was immediately taken by the voice, how it caressed the lyrics. And how the lyrics were so beautiful to a girl of 15, trying to figure out about poetry and why it made her feel she knew a different language, one created for her alone. These were poems but they were also songs and how was that possible? (This was the time of Black Sabbath, the Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, and even if you liked those songs, it was hard to think of them as literary texts as well, capable of leading you into the world, a traveler, an explorer. Or maybe I mean that the person they led into the world was not the person I wanted to be, knew I was on the cusp of being.)

And it has to be said: he was devastatingly sexy. The voice and the face.

All these years later, he feels like he’s been a companion. Someone thinking deeply and writing beautifully and remembering.

Days of Kindness

Greece is a good place
to look at the moon, isn’t it
You can read by moonlight
You can read on the terrace
You can see a face
as you saw it when you were young
There was good light then
oil lamps and candles
and those little flames
that floated on a cork in olive oil
What I loved in my old life
I haven’t forgotten
It lives in my spine
Marianne and the child
The days of kindness
It rises in my spine
and it manifests as tears
I pray that loving memory
exists for them too
the precious ones I overthrew
for an education in the world

Hydra, 1985

And now it seems he was a prophet too. I’ve hesitated to write about the recent American election results. It matters, of course it does. Power has shifted and someone utterly unsuited (poor impulse control, no record of public service, a history of dreadful employment practices, just to begin the list) to lead one of the most militaristic and powerful countries on earth has been elected by people who believe him to have their interests at heart. I don’t know what to say. But it turns out Leonard Cohen was predicting it all along. And was he being ironic or hopeful when he said this:

From the wars against disorder,
from the sirens night and day,
from the fires of the homeless,
from the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Ironic, I think.)

But yes, predicting it all along:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died

As he said in that first poem I memorized (before Shakespeare’s 29th Sonnet, before Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”), “Nor is this a mourning song.” He lived a good life and he gave us so much. I’m looking at a mountain as I write, “fragrant, dark and softly white/under the pale of mist”, and although it already has a name, this morning it’s for him.

This morning, coming into my study, I stopped by the door to look at the drawing hanging on the wall. How many times do I come into this room and never notice it? Hundreds of times. Thousands. But this morning I noticed. Last year, over the Christmas holiday, I was writing a long essay in which this drawing has a little cameo. I was writing an essay about the artist who drew it–me–and how his life and my life entwined for a few years. By the time he drew this, we were “friends”, or at least that’s what I thought. But writing the essay had me re-reading a stack of old letters he’d written to me and I realized he never gave up his obsessive hope that I would realize I should make my life with him.

“On hair falling down in curls.”

Section 389 of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Notebook.

On hair falling down in curls:
Observe the motion of the surface of the water which resembles that of hair, and has two motions, of which one goes on with the flow of the surface, the other forms the lines of the eddies; thus the water forms eddying whirlpools one part of which are due to the impetus of the principal current and the other to the incidental motion and return flow.

He drew me once with my third child. He drew on rough paper that began to deteriorate almost at once. He made a copy and brought it when he came for a visit. It’s on the wall outside my study and I see it every time I come in to work at my desk. When he brought it I almost forgot the difficult weeks, the letters, the pressure, the insistent pronouncements of love. Look at my strong arms, the drapery of my clothes, the soft curl of my hair down my back, like water in motion. Look at my hands.

I almost forgot.

Hundreds of time a year I pass the drawing. Hundreds of times I come down the stairs from my bedroom to encounter a portrait of myself hanging in the stairwell, myself at 23. The essay began as a conversation with that younger self. I finished it last March and it sits in various forms–paper, pdf, etc.–in my study. It would be difficult to publish it, for some legal reasons, for reasons of length (34,000 words) and subject matter (the male gaze, how it insinuates itself into a life, and how difficult it is to look away), and maybe most of all for personal reasons that involve my own sense of trespass. (It’s complicated.) Writing the essay was troubling and also cathartic.

As the old year fades away in grey light, I am sitting at my desk and thinking, taking stock of the past 12 months: what was accomplished, what was lost, what gave me joy, what didn’t. I wrote this essay, I worked on a novel, Easthope, set near me on the Sechelt Peninsula, I spent time with my family, with a few good friends. I swam in the Pacific Ocean in January on a trip to Baja and I swam daily, from the first of May until mid-October, in the lake near my home. As the old year fades, the lines of the drawing fade a little too. It’s behind glass. When I swim, my hair is water in motion and the years flow around me like water. There was so much I forgot until I wrote it down.

Tag: poetry

redux: there was good light then

“On hair falling down in curls.”