Choosy Mothers Choose Cohen

I'm picky. Even the things I like I usually find fault with. 


I love poetry, but most of it bores me. I love science fiction, but not when it's escapist or cheap or silly. I listen to every genre of music, but generally only a handful of artists in any given style. 


So when I say that I love Leonard Cohen, I feel I should qualify that with an asterisk or a footnote. His poems and lyrics can be insightful or self-aggrandizing, deeply spiritual or vague and New Age. I like his chord progressions but usually can't stand his musical arrangements.


But he's usually worth hearing. In one of the articles I read on him he mentions his daily routine: wakes up, meditates for a solid 4 hours, then writes for a solid 4 hours. Then he can go about his day. For every stanza that makes it into one of his songs there are usually ten which don't make the cut.


He has a discipline and focus that plenty of his contemporaries don't, so there's far less chaff. (I'm not pointing any fingers or mentioning any names.)


And this prose poem from his collection "Beautiful Losers" really sticks with me. The person he mentions at the end, Catherine Tekakwitha, was a Mohawk Indian who converted to Catholicism and was eventually canonized. Cohen is Jewish by ethnicity and Buddhist by practice, but he seems to have a fascination with Christianity, Catholicism in particular. I don't know if the poem is mocking or praising these religious medals, but the descriptions and situations seem to rise to my memory frequently. 

Be With Me

Leonard Cohen

Be with me, religious medals of all kind, those suspended on silver chains, those pinned to the underwear with a safety pin, those nestling in black chest hair, those which run like tram cars on the creases between the breasts of old happy women, those that by mistake dig into the skin while love is made, those that lie abandoned with cufflinks, those that are fingered like coins an inspected by silver hallmark, those that are lost in clothes by necking fifteen-year-olds, those that are put in the mouth while thinking, those very expensive ones that only thin small girl children are permitted to wear, those hanging in a junk closet along with unknotted neckties, those that are kissed for luck, those that are torn from neck in anger, those that are stamped, those that are engraved, those that are placed on streetcar tracks for curious alterations, those that are fastened to the felt on the roof of taxis, be with me as I witness the ordeal of Catherine Tekakwitha.