I'M YOUR MAN

for Leonard Cohen


What were you looking for,
Leonard, as you haunted
the dark streets of Montreal
and Greece, as the midnight moon
spun like a coin above
your sacrosanct adventures? 
What was it like to be torn
between a woman's flesh,
and a single sweet breath
that illuminates the face of God?
Could you hear your mother's whispers
burn in your ear as she admonished
you from the mansion on the hill,
her sanity nothing more than
tea leaves at the bottom of a cup?
They say that after a swim in the Aegean
you would retire to your place in Hydra,
the thick white walls serving
as a sanctuary from the past,
where the priest's blessing was nothing
more than a black soot cross
over the doorway.  In the afternoons,
you smoked on the balcony and
listened to the birds,
thinking of the Talmud. Later,
as the narrative goes, you drank coffee
in the corners of dark island restaurants, 
scribbling furiously, dreaming of the perfect line
until suddenly, you saw her in the doorway, your face
obscured by sun. 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.