Invite them to your email inbox, which I did when I signed up for this poem-a-day project "POME" by Matthew Ogle. This moment of surprise art has been a defining spark of a morning routine that tips me careening into inspiration. Thank you Matthew Ogle!
Today's musing was from Leonard Cohen who, around 40 years old at the time of the writing, already seemed to be wearily identifying as artistically aged, though I suspect that turned around for him, or perhaps was just a passing mood, as the iconoclast kept on creating, releasing new works just weeks before his walk through the gate of this world.
My husband worked musically with Adam Cohen, who is the son of Leonard Cohen, so it happened that I got to meet the sage and by “meet” I mean stand three feet down the sidewalk and watch a suited gentleman give familial attention to his son under a streetlight, silver hair shining against the ink of L.A. sky.
And because I long for an understanding that has always eluded me, I could recall many nights and mornings under sheets, and stolen minutes between classes and jobs sitting in a car or at a lunch table turning pages, fondling a poet's secrets, curled into the spirit of tea and oranges, teleported to a bohemian jungle of nylon stringed guitars where I tugged at dust from a cloak for the percipience of Jesus.
These imagined intimacies were to go unexpressed on the evening I lingered behind Leonard Cohen, inhaling the same night jasmine, rocking to the beat of his progeny, him wondering at a son’s art, me studying the shape of a poet’s head.