I'M YOUR MAN (NEWEST DRAFT)

for Leonard Cohen

What were you looking for,
Leonard, as you haunted
the evening streets of Greece, 
while the midnight moon

spun above your venerable 
escapades like a coin?  
What was it like to be torn 
between a woman's flesh 
and a single sweet breath
that illuminates the face of God?
Did your mother's whispers
burn in your ear as she admonished
you from her hilltop mansion,
her sanity nothing more than swirling
tea leaves at the bottom of a cup?
After a swim in the Aegean
you towel dried your hair

and retired to your place in Hydra,
where the thick white walls were

a sanctuary from the past and 
the priest's blessing, a black soot cross
over the doorway.  In the afternoon 
you smoked on the balcony and 
listened to the birds, dwelling on 
the Talmud and the mystery 
of Christ's wooden tower.

Then, as the story goes, you drank 
coffee in the corners of secluded island 
restaurants, scribbling furiously, 
dreaming of the perfect line
until suddenly, her face obscured by sun, 

she sees you from the doorway. 
Yes, finally, it was your muse, Marianne, 
whose husband had just run off 
with another woman and who, 
so long after you left Greece,

and so many years before she passed, 
called your old-fashioned love
“a beautiful, slow moving movie.”