Oh take this longing from my tongue: lines from the broken-down nightingale

I've had a friend in town. We probably drove by you a handful of times late at night. We were singing with all the car windows down as if a whole decade hadn't wedged and widened itself between when we had first met and now.

Then this morning I woke up thinking of Leonard Cohen. I remembered the lyric: 'hungry as an archway.' And I decided that was very true feeling. There is an arching to want.

Cohen said things like this, too:

'I cannot understand why my arm is not a lilac tree.'

and

'So come my friends, be not afraid. We are so lightly here.'

and

'You should go from place to place recovering the poems that have been written for you.'

That last I think is from Book of Longings, which I haven't read, but opened once in a bookstore. The words leaped out and came with me I guess.

Lying there this morning, with my eyes thudding a little from the booze we drank and drank last night, I thought of Jeff Buckley and Wolf River and Glen Hansard's comment about Hallelujah: 'Jeff sang it back to Leonard as a love song to what he achieved.'

Thankfully, Seamus nudged me to go out or who knows what tailspin I might have occupied. Anyhow, those lines of Cohen's are so sweet, and I wanted to remember them to you.

Of the Same Waves: para Frida, en su cumpleaños...

I thought we might spend this Sunday with Frida and imagine that we are in la Casa Azul and that someone is bringing to the courtyard a plate of bourbon biscuits and a bottle of brandy.

The Ancient Concealer's writing was as fierce and piercing and wry as her canvases.

  • “I tried to drown my sorrows but the bastards learned how to swim.”

And then,

  • "¿se pueden inventar verbos? quiero decirte uno: yo te cielo, así mis alas se extienden enormes para amarte sin medida... somos de las misma materia, de las mismas ondas...”

Have you read her diaries? The last line, amid sketches, of her final, suicidal entry reads: “I hope the leaving is joyful—and I hope never to return—FRIDA.”

 
 
 

“Diego my love- Remember that once you finish the fresco we will be together forever once and for all, without arguments or anything, only to love one another. Behave yourself and do everything that Emmy Lou tells you. I adore you more than ever. Your girl, Frida (Write me).”