Читать книгу Travels with my Daughter - Niema Ash - Страница 13
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The Healing of Leonard Cohen
When Ronit was eleven, I scraped together enough money to spend several weeks in Ireland. By then I had completed a Masters thesis on the well-known Irish poet and dramatist, W.B. Yeats, and had begun a doctorate. I decided to attend the Yeats Summer School in Sligo and travel in Ireland with research as my excuse. I had been growing increasingly restless. The Finjan was no longer, and I was straining at the bit, yearning for travel. Whereas Shimon thrived on predictability, I withered. He needed home. I needed travel. Without rancour or bitterness we had been steadily growing in different directions.
The trip to Ireland heightened my longing for the road. I returned to Montreal even more restless, unprepared for what awaited me there. Without warning Shimon had left me and was living with someone else. Although I understood his motivations, I was devastated. Trapped, bereft, penniless, I spent the next six months chained to circumstances I was powerless to alter, my travel dreams shattered by unrelenting reality. Then suddenly everything changed. I received a three year Canada Council award, plus travel grant, to complete my doctorate at the university of my choice. My ticket to ride was magically reissued. I packed one bag for myself, one for Ronit and, leaving Shimon with whatever worldly possessions I had, Ronit and I took off for England.
The only material thing I regretted leaving behind was my kitchen with its “wall of fame.” When Ronit was two we had moved into a larger flat where she and I remained until leaving for England. The flat had a remarkable kitchen. It had a special energy, a special ambience, a well-being where things flowed, things happened. It was spacious, yet snug, with a wall of windows overlooking a wild field, a tract of unspoiled land prohibited to builders, a rare event in the bosom of a city. In summer the field was filled with flowers, birds and sunshine, making one feel expansive, extending the kitchen into a macrocosm of possibilities. In winter it was blanketed with snow, long shadows and cold stars, the kitchen withdrawing into an interior landscape, a secret refuge, cosy, warm, intimate. The skies were never still, moving from serene to angry, blue or grey or pink in the day, black with soft moons or streaks of Northern Lights at night. It was a vista conducive to discoveries, revelations, creations. The kitchen table was its heart, generating life, providing a continuous feast. It was around the kitchen table, folded into black velvet skies, drawn by a circle of candle light into compelling universes, that I fell in love with music, with musicians, with poetry, with friends; it was here that I dreamed my dreams of travel; that I prepared long loving dinners; that I did my work, planning choreography, reading and revising for university exams, toiling into the night on overdue term papers. I remember Ronit waking late one night to find me at the kitchen table immersed in books, notes and typewriter, my eyes strained with the effort of completing a paper due next day. “Papers, papers, papers,” she wailed, “I’m never going to university!” But the kitchen gave me energy, stamina, strength to persevere. It was my perfect place.
Late one morning, during The Finjan days, I woke to find a legend boldly inscribed across the kitchen wall. “This is the one and only kitchen in the whole wide world” it proclaimed, signed “Ron Eliran,” the Israeli singer then performing at The Finjan. I was so taken aback I hardly registered the sentiment, so perfectly in tune with mine. How dare he deface my kitchen wall. Immediately I tried to scrub it clean. But scrawled with an indelible marker, it refused to be eradicated. When I confronted Ron, he was unrepentant. “Why did you do that?” I moaned, “I can’t wash it off.”
“I did it because it had to be done.… It must never be washed off. Everyone who stays here should write something for the wall. It will be a wall of fame, a thank you to this wonderful kitchen.”
Shimon agreed and the wall of fame was bom. For me it became a celebration of my kitchen, of The Finjan, of the musicians, of my substitute for travel, of all of us together. After I left Montreal I never saw it again, but wherever I went I took that kitchen and its wall of fame with me.
Although the wall provided happy recollections, it evoked one disturbing memory which continued to haunt me. When the now-famous blues musician, John Lee Hooker, performed at The Finjan, spending wonderful hours in our kitchen, I asked him, as a matter of course, to sign the wall. I was taken aback by his adamant refusal. “Everyone writes something on the wall,” I protested. But he was unyielding. “Please John,” I urged, unable to fathom this stubborn refusal in someone so amenable, “I really want you to sign the wall.… I want to remember you being here.” But, uncharacteristically, he continued to refuse, and, characteristically, I continued to twist his arm. “Why John? Why won’t you sign the wall?” I pleaded.
Finally he offered a lame, “I don’t know what to write.”
“That’s no problem,” I said with a sense of deliverance. At that time he had a hit song in circulation called Boom Boom. “Just write ‘Boom Boom’ … nothing else … just ‘Boom Boom’ … that’ll be great.” Eroded by my insistence, he acquiesced. “Good man,” I said, handing him the felt pen. He clutched it like a child grasping a too-fat crayon, and in slow awkward letters painfully scratched an M … an O … another O and a misshapen N facing backwards. Suddenly it hit me. He was illiterate. He couldn’t write. And I had forced humiliation upon him. Mortified, I watched him press another tortured M … O … O and a wounded N into the wall.
“Boom! Boom!” he smiled broadly, his ordeal over.
“Thanks John, I really appreciate that,” I said, severely chastened. “Now I’ll always think of you when I look at the wall.” And I always did, but with a stinging shame.
At first I intended finishing my university degree in Ireland since I was working on an Irish writer. But after attending the Yeats Summer School and spending some time in Dublin, I realised this was not a good idea. It would be too difficult for a woman on her own with a child to live in Ireland. In a country where divorce was not permitted, where men lived with their mothers until they married in their late thirties or even mid forties, and where sexual repression was rampant, I would be too high profile, up for grabs. Even being in Ireland without Ronit gave rise to a plague of curiosity, making me feel as though my bones were being picked. Although I loved Ireland and the Irish, the poetry, the talk, the music, the hilarity, the madness, I knew I couldn’t live there. It was too introverted, too incestuous, to give me the anonymity I desired.
I had already suffered unwanted attention in Montreal where the English-speaking community was relatively small and where Shimon was relatively well known because of The Finjan years and his subsequent success as a performer. Everyone knew we had parted, that he was living with someone else. Strangers would express sorrow at our separation. The looks of sympathy and commiseration had been difficult to bear, they were like eulogies at my funeral. I decided on London where no one was interested in me, except for Ruth, my only friend there, and Rosy, whom I had met at the Yeats Summer School and recognised as a soul mate.
I had written my Masters thesis on W.B. Yeats’ Plays For Dancers, excited by the discovery that Yeats, like myself, was impelled by dance, that it was central to his concept of drama. His fascination with dance and the plays themselves so impressed me that, determined to disprove the critics’ claim that Yeats was the greatest twentieth century poet but a failed dramatist, I had convinced The Centaur Theatre, the principal English-speaking theatre in Montreal, to stage two of his dance plays with myself as choreographer and assistant director. That’s how I came to meet Brian Stavetchney. He was the main actor-dancer in the plays and quickly became devoted to Yeats and to me. The more we worked together the more I realised how perfectly suited he was to creating the elusive qualities Yeats was after, like evoking those emotions which “haunt the edge of trance,” those perceptions outside the scope of reason, the “intimacies, ecstasies and anguish of soul life,” the “images that remind us of vast passions.” Yeats wanted his theatre to call up the world of imagination and spirit, to be magical.
Brian had a magic about him. He was spectacular to look at with a shock of frizzy sunflower hair that framed his head like a halo. His long oval face, high cheekbones and startling blue eyes were so striking that even in repose he appeared to be on stage. His face was always alive as though sensing nuances the rest of us were unable to perceive, vibrations we couldn’t feel, like a finely attuned animal, alert, responsive, tuned into another dimension. His body was beautiful, long and lean and golden. It was eloquent, able to communicate when he was silent, and he moved it like a dancer even when he was still. He didn’t speak much but when he did speak his voice was soft and resonant, rich and melodic on stage. I came to see him as some aspect of Yeats, some incarnation Yeats would have desired. Much later, in the months he was in London, it was Brian who insisted on us forming the Yeats Theatre Company and performing several of the dance plays, the first professional production in London since Yeats’ death, and attended by T.S. Eliot’s wife, Valerie, and Ninette de Valois, founder of The Royal Ballet Company, among others. I was merely impelled by his energy. Not long after Shimon and I separated Brian and I became lovers, and when I left Montreal with Ronit, he came with us.
My plan was for the three of us to spend the first part of the summer in Greece on the island of Lesbos with my closest friend Rachel, and then for Brian and I to go on to Ireland to attend the Yeats Summer School, for him an exciting bonus. Rachel, Irving and their son David were spending the summer on Lesbos. Irving, considered Canada’s leading poet, had been my teacher at university, the inspiration behind my pursuit of Yeats. Leonard Cohen, David’s godfather, was also expected. Irving was his mentor and contact with Irving gave him sustenance. Brian, who admired both men and who was a devout reader of their poetry, was thrilled by the possibility of meeting them.
Ronit looked forward to Lesbos. She would be seeing David whom she sorely missed since Rachel and Irving had moved to Toronto the previous year. Although several years older than David they were very close, each like the brother or sister the other never had. I sorely missed Rachel. Since childhood I always had a best friend, friends being the most valued thing in my life. But Rachel was more than a best friend, more than a sister, there was an empathy between us, a twinned connection, that even strangers recognised. Although we looked nothing like each other, she was fair and I dark, although we spoke English with different accents, people confused us, calling her Niema and me Rachel, forgetting which of us they had talked to, which of us had said what, which child belonged to whom.
We never exhausted our times together, always had more to reveal. We shared our most intimate moments, stood by each other through every crisis, were each other’s main source of comfort. When Rachel was devastated by the sudden death of a good friend, Irving sent me to be with her. When Shimon decided he wanted to live with someone else, he first told Rachel asking her how best to tell me. I was with Rachel when she gave birth to David, when she fed him his first spoon of solid food, when he locked himself in a car for which there was no key.
It was never an imposition, a burden, to listen to the repetitive agonised sagas of her life with Irving — the much older man she had pursued and was living with — it was a privilege. I loved her “quicksilver intelligence” (Irving’s phrase), her acid wit, her humour, her vitality, her appetite for experience, her generosity with her friendship. If times were bad for me, her presence improved them, and if times were good, her presence made them even better. We gave each other permission to take pleasure from life, a precept adhered to by my parents but vigorously denied by hers. We could be open, exposed, vulnerable, with complete trust. And when we were “on” we could take on the world, and did. A German poet or was it philosopher once said, Love is greater than genius itself and friendship is greater than love. He could have been referring to our friendship. Unlike love, it brought no hurt, no violent mood swings, no desperation. Most importantly it was not an addiction, it was more like a sustaining habit, like a book at bedtime, a great healer. It was its very “greatness” that made it difficult for others to contend with. Although Irving and I had been friends before I met Rachel, he sometimes couldn’t help resenting our special attachment. “Your wife called,” he would report sardonically. “You spend so much time with Rachel, why don’t you move in,” my mother would complain. But lately we had been living in different cities, and now we would be living in different countries. Our time together in Lesbos was especially precious.
I also looked forward to seeing Leonard Cohen. I had met him many years before at Irving and Rachel’s. From the first meeting, Leonard fascinated me with his bitter-sweet attitudes to life, his penetrating humour often entrenched in pain and directed against himself, his beautiful melancholy, his dark mesmerising good looks and his promise of anguish and ecstasy. Perhaps it was because of this promise, made in poems and songs bleeding with tender love, yet savagely accurate, delivered in his smoky opium voice resonant with incantation that spanned Rabbinical intoning to Buddhist chanting, that both men and women were to phone him saying they wanted to hear the sound of his voice before taking their lives. He was a magnet for the tortured.
Although he was very young at the time he seemed to peel and discard layer after layer of living, as though he had been on earth an eternity. Yet he could be newborn, child-like, unfallen. Like Bob Dylan his imagination had a life of its own, an original way of seeing things, of yoking ideas, but his was a darker vision, intense, haunted, as though he had visits with doom. Predictably enough he was intrigued by Bob Dylan, by his songs, by his startling imagination, by his rise to fame. He was just beginning to write songs himself and was overwhelmed that I knew Bob Dylan. He wanted to hear every detail about him, especially what it was like to be famous, even to know someone famous. Ironically, he was to find out all too soon. And, to compound the irony, in 1975 Dylan was to dedicate his album Desire to Leonard Cohen.
When Ronit graduated from elementary school, Irving gave her a copy of Leonard Cohen’s poems with the inscription, “Now that you have graduated, let Leonard Cohen do the rest!” He asked Leonard to autograph the book and Leonard added, “Yeah, let me do the rest!” He was drawn to Ronit’s undefiled girlhood and made me promise to keep her in white until she was old enough to marry him. But a photograph I have of them at this time looks like they were already married. Such was the oneness between them, the similarity of expression, of unseen internal forces shaping the external image. Caught by the camera in a moment of intense connection, they were two aspects of one reality. Ronit looking outwards in innocent wonder, entering life, Leonard with his arm around her shoulder, protecting her from what he had already lived.
For me the most striking thing about Leonard was a compelling kind of madness, and a genius for infecting others with it. Both Rachel and I were especially susceptible to this seductive charisma and an experience we had with it was so intense, so bizarre, so magical, that it remains one of the extraordinary happenings in my life. It was made possible not only because of Leonard’s unique power, but because Rachel and I were together, experiencing it with him.
One of Irving’s qualities I found most attractive was his interest in younger writers. No matter how busy he was he found time to offer encouragement and advice, even financial assistance to the promising young poets who regularly sought him out. Leonard Cohen was such a young poet. His zaniness, “the joker high and wild,” the gypsy-boy, complemented Irving’s essential sobriety; his pale aristocratic inheritance, Irving’s robust peasant roots. They were drawn together like the joining of night with day. Leonard had a profound regard for Irving’s talent as a poet and a deep love for him as a man. Irving considered Leonard to have “the purest lyrical gift in the country,” and cherished him as a friend. Leonard fascinated Irving; his tortured sensibility, his mystical yearnings, his affinity with pain, his Christ—like suffering, were diametrically opposed to Irving’s pragmatic vigorous solidity, his refusal to turn the other cheek. Leonard brought Irving in touch with an ethos Irving could not otherwise reach. And, in turn, Leonard drew strength from Irving’s vast resources of stability and health. Leonard’s first book of poetry was dedicated to Irving.
Later, Leonard expanded his literary activities to include novels and then turned to writing songs and eventually to performing them. Although from the beginning he achieved popularity in the States, especially as a song-writer and performer, he wasn’t successful in Canada except among a small group of admirers. Canada refused to recognise his talents. Every grant, every award, he applied for was denied and everything he published, every performance he gave, received a negative review. Discouraged by repeated rejection he left Montreal and went to live in New York. Years later, when, as a successful super star with several gold albums, he returned to Montreal to give his first big concert there, he was still steeling himself against the anticipated negative response. Rachel and I found him in the dressing room composing a terse reply to the inevitable bad review he knew would appear in the Montreal Star.
“Why do you bother?” Rachel asked. “The London Times says you’re great, the New York Times says you’re fantastic, you get international rave reviews, why do you care what the pathetic little Montreal Star writes?”
“Because,” he answered sadly, “my mother reads the Montreal Star. She’s convinced I’m a failure.”
I came to know Leonard through my friendship with Irving and Rachel. I met him often at their home before he became famous, and then at least for Christmas once he was famous. He believed in maintaining traditions, said they were his anchor in the chaos of existence. Even if it meant flying from one side of the world to the other, he never failed to share the Christmas spirit with his dear friend Irving, and with Rachel and David. Ronit and I would come as well, and the six of us would usher in the Yuletide with blessings for peace and love. After dinner Leonard would lead us in various ceremonies and rituals, depending on what esoteric philosophy he was involved with at the time. One year we incanted the mantra Om Mani Padme Hum by the light of a single candle, entranced by the sound of the Tibetan words: God in unmanifest form is like a jewel in the centre of a lotus, manifest in my heart. We chanted invocations for peace and love until, in a semi-hypnotic state, we could feel our energies merging with the cosmic energies in an overwhelming energy of universal love. Even Irving was captivated.
It was Leonard who first introduced me to Tibet, an introduction that was to become an obsession. Leonard emanated a contagious magic. He was a master at evoking mystical atmospheres, creating strange moods where all things were possible. Like a magician he wove a spell impelling sceptic and believer alike to surrender to it. His writing and his music had this same compelling power. Like Rachel, I was especially receptive to these charged atmospheres. He once told me that I was a “familiar,” that force which is conducive to the creation of magic, like the black cat whose presence assists the clairvoyant — the catalyst that makes the magic happen. I had never considered that possibility but I was pleased he had. Leonard moved in and out of my life at intervals which became further apart the more famous he became.
The event I referred to earlier occurred one cold Montreal night. My friend Tom phoned telling me he had managed to procure some magic mushrooms. Leonard had introduced both Irving and Rachel to magic mushrooms, the love drug, and they reported huge ecstasies, delights of phenomenal proportions. I was a coward when it came to drugs. I even avoided aspirin. I didn’t smoke tobacco and rarely drank alcohol. Even when Shimon and I were travelling in Spain and a free bottle of wine came with every meal, we left it untouched. But the mushrooms intrigued me. They grew in Mexico where the Indians used them for religious, spiritual and magical rites. Friends I knew had swung in hammocks for months on end waiting for the magic mushroom to mature. I took the plunge.
Before leaving for Tom’s I phoned Rachel to convey my anxieties.
“You’re going to have a super time,” she assured me, “one of the most fabulous times of your life. Lucky thing. Phone me and tell me how it’s going. Better still, come over. Leonard is in town. I’m sure he’d love to see you.”
“I’ll phone and let you know,” I said, reassured. I crossed the threshold of Tom’s living room as though stepping on stage for my big performance. Tom, detecting my stage nerves, said he wouldn’t take any mushrooms so that I could rely on his sobriety. Tom radiated a Rock of Gibraltar dependability. He was raised on a farm in Saskatchewan drinking milk straight from the cows. I swallowed the mushrooms with total confidence.
By the time I phoned Rachel I was deep into the delights she had promised. Tom’s spartan living room was alive with paintings composed of tiny points of light, with music becoming dancing sound, with colours singing in a rainbow arc. I was the heart of a magic lantern.
“Rachel, everything is beaming diamond light.”
“Beaming diamond light,” Rachel repeated.
“Tell her to bring it here.” It was Leonard’s voice.
Tom and I arrived in a cocoon of silver snow flakes while I was at the peak of my trip and sat by the log fire splashing warmth in colours of gold. The room, usually lovely, was exquisite with its Indian table composed of tiny pieces of mother-of-pearl, radiating light, like a chest of jewels. Irving and Leonard sat on the pale gold sofa and I knelt beside them gazing into their faces, exhilarated by my crystal vision. “What do you see?” Leonard asked.
“I see a spiral of words dancing from your mouth on to the table where they wind among the jewels, fill with light and then sparkle into Irving’s mouth and dance back into your’s, leaping higher and growing more luminous each time they pass.”
Rachel, Irving and Leonard took turns asking, “What do you see?” and then began adding their visions to mine, in a shimmering cascade of words until the words began to rotate in a kaleidoscope of images, brilliant upon brilliant, our laughter whirling in the air like sparklers spinning, spiralling up and up, riding my contact high. Tom remained apart, blinded, unable to enter the magic circle as it sped faster and faster.
Suddenly Leonard raised his hand. The kaleidoscope stilled. His voice echoed from a solemn cavern deep within him. “Friends,” he said gravely, “I must reveal to you a problem I have, which I was unable to share until tonight.”
“The problems of Leonard Cohen, a legend in his own time, do not exist,” Rachel chanted. “A man who can have everything he wants, success, money, fame, women, is no longer entitled to have problems.”
“Can you have all the women you want?” Irving asked, his mouth pursing with admiration.
“Yes. It’s like magic. I enter a crowded elevator and point. When I reach my floor the woman I pointed at follows me.”
“And that’s a problem?” Irving intoned. “I should have such problems. It sounds more like a paradise.”
“Yes, that’s a problem. Because now that I can have any woman I lay my finger on, I can’t make love to any of them. I haven’t been able to have an erection for almost a year.”
“You,” Rachel gasped, “guru of love, every woman’s rising star, the man with the golden organ. You haven’t been able to have an erection?”
“Yes,” Leonard said, his eyes dark with shame. “I’m a fraud.”
Suddenly I felt a wild exhilaration. “On this night we have the power to magic your erection back.”
Leonard had laid his finger on me. His response was immediate. As though pronouncing a prophecy, he said: “Tonight shall be remembered as the night the erection of Leonard Cohen returned to earth.” His voice resounded with the power of miracle. “Henceforth virgins dressed in white will light candles to commemorate the miracle, proclaiming, ‘Leonard Cohen’s erection is alive. Magic is afoot.’”
Leonard, the orgy master, cracked his whip and the sparks burst into flame.
“We shall have an erection competition.” He was inspired, intoxicating. “The men will stand side by side, penises exposed. The ladies will dance naked before them.”
He spoke like a medium manifesting a vision. And we all submitted like novices to an all-enveloping spiritual mystery. “I have never won anything in my life. But tonight I shall be the winner, my competitors will bless me with success.”
He proceeded to conjure up the dance.
“First you will move sensuously, encouraging, coaxing erection. Woman as seducer. Then your dance will become a ritual of growth, of procreation. The goddess dancing a fertility rite to encourage a fruitful yield. The men will partake in a ceremony of manhood, a contest of virility. The first man to achieve erection is the victor.” He wore the robes of prophet.
Leonard put a record on and lit several candles. The music glittered in its own elaborate choreography through the firelight and candlelight. Rachel peeled off her clothes, eager to partake in the ritual. She adored Leonard and loved yielding to the power of his baroque imagination. Besides, refusing him would be like the tides refusing the moon. She became a beautiful sprite, surrounded by an aura of light. I removed my blouse, my breasts powerful in my hands, but retained my skirt, swishing silk against my thighs, my purple stockings and my Chinese slippers winking sequins. Leonard graciously permitted the transgressions. Three limp penises lined up against the wall. Tom’s eyes were downcast, like a Samson, his hair newly shorn, or a cowboy, fresh from the prairies, suddenly naked in Sodom or Gemorah, not daring to behold the twin wickedness, yet fatally drawn to the decadence, an Adam doomed to partake in sin. Leonard’s white skin stretched porcelain thin over a slender frame, helpless on the cross of his body. Irving was an immovable mountain, his limbs thick tree roots, planted firmly in its base, his legs astride, a Colossus ready for battle.
Leonard raised his arm signalling Rachel and me to dance. We moved first like belly dancers in a harem, navels flashing, bodies rubbed in perfumed oils. Then we became Everywoman, the temptress, the enchantress, dancing a timeless seduction. I see Rachel become Eve, then Helen of Troy, then Lolita; I am Cleopatra, Mata Hari, Jezebel. Breasts, belly, thighs, rocking, swaying, tempting invisible maleness. Hips pulsating deep into the journey of seduction, searching for the golden stud, Adam, Caesar, Christ. Then slowly into rituals of fertility, kneeling, blessing the earth, arms lifting in spirals from earth through rain and sun. Palms reaching to the sky in an invocation of growth.
Leonard watched like a caged bird, its beak open in a silent mating song. Irving watched, steeped in poetry, and Tom like a displaced cock unable to crow. Rachel and I danced together, a ballet celebrating the female, withdrawing from the male, the mesmerised trinity deaf to our rhythms, their penises cobras who had forgotten how to be charmed.
Then slowly, very slowly, I danced to the sofa and folded into the gold, beckoning Leonard and Irving to either side of me. Tom sat facing us bathed in redemption as Rachel sensing his discomfort climbed into his lap and perched on his knee, smiling like a child in the Garden of Eden. I felt newly born, my body fresh like morning sunshine, but with an ancient miracle, the power of healer. Beside me Leonard’s penis lay like a broken bird. Carefully I took it in my hand. As it nested in my fingers, I saw its mouth open and begin to sing. I listened to the notes of a birdsong.
“The bird is singing.” I smiled up at Leonard. Then I heard another call, faint, distant. I covered Irving’s penis with my other hand. Yes. A mating call. “Two love birds, two song birds,” I crooned.
“And you are creating the music,” Leonard said. I sat between them cradling their music in my palms, feeling them fuse into a single instrument and I its maestro. I, who could hardly bang out chopsticks, began playing like a virtuoso, fingering the pipes, simultaneously, alternately, my hands embracing, strumming, stroking, plucking flecks of golden light, my fingertips seething with tattoos of sound as music shuttled through my fingers. I could sense the hushed audience enthralled as I tossed my head and played for the universe, feeling the music in my nostrils, hearing it on my tongue, tasting it through my eyes. I was an inspired musician playing a divine organ.
Irving and Leonard closed their eyes, released into perfect attunement. Rachel’s smile, Tom’s blessings, swelled the notes, as we created magical harmonies, mysterious chords, fierce rhythms.
“It’s the sacred music of the spheres,” I said with wonder. Wild sounds tamed by my hands into cradlesongs and beating wild again. And I, pulled by the pipes into pools of music flowing between us, knowing every thought they knew, feeling every thought they felt. One hand on the crucifix, one hand on the song. Touching where they could not. Feeling for them, through them, into them, composing, orchestrating, their music exploding in my hands. Union. Communion. The older poet giving to the younger his strength, his potency. And the younger poet giving to the older, his youth, his love. And I the altar, the temple, the wishing well of their love. They create through me. Madonna. Tara. Sheba. The birth of the Young King. And Leonard is born in my hand, and grows through me, through Rachel, through Irving, through Tom. Erect.
“Standing ovation!” Leonard shouted, rising. We applauded, celebrating Leonard’s erection, as candles ignited all about us in thanksgiving and commemoration.
