Sincerely, Lady Midnight:

a Montreal travel diary in conversation with Leonard Cohen

[sincerelyladymidnight]

poem: let me in let me in let me in

I will weather this all inside the space you have made for me because you have made it.

And I won’t let it be simply reality caught in the atmosphere till dusk this time.

too fragrant now or frought with foamy struggle, darling, I’ll come out of this owning your dreams.

loss of consciousness is only lightning strike to a bone or sacrum we may or may not need to make progress, you and I, don’t you understand as much?

I have planted a seed of milkweed in your higher mind so that I can eventually be cleansed and pure as arctic poppy to find your eye.

don’t resist a good girl freshly emerged from all that soil you turned last summer, lest you leave her no option

but to breathe against your door. and I will, breathe slowly into the screen with my eyes closed in prayer

to a goddess that has known my name and promised me tokens.

[thefierystatehotel]

Day Six //

I lay on a bench in Parc du Portugal today and imagined your face above me. Does that sound crazy? You said: “Thats rough, sweetheart, but get at it. What do you expect, all the pain and the doubt and the fear to subside because you’re at some coordinates you’ve designated something? What are you waiting for, the world to make less sense? Get at it.”

[sincerelyladymidnight]

the first song lyrics that came to me here... I never kept my mouth shut like you. Never wore the dress you asked me to. you said you'd be my sailor I said, "baby, be my storm." You cried, "send me a savior!" I showed you budding horns. My lover from the North, I've heard you've found the door. I can see you laughing now. But you don't call me anymore. I'm rushing with this river toward the boys who cast all day, all night. They'll use the last of light. I'll use it too. I've got more to say than sorry now, but that will have to do. I'm coming for you. (6/25/17)

[sincerelyladymidnight]

Day Five //

Let there be light. Yesterday I met Susan, a fellow Cohencentric writer sitting in Parc du Portugal right across from me, soaking in the same presence that so undeniably permeated the parkside block of Rue du Vallieres.

I noticed Susan immediately because, though I can barely see faces at her distance, I could feel the expression on her face. I could feel that she was free of the daily grind, as I was, so maybe a general bohemian? Maybe a traveler like me? I could feel that this woman with a lovely aura sitting across from me in the park with her bike had escaped something, as I had. We were living in a stolen slice of heaven for our present moment, who knows how or why we had run for it. But it made me happy. I played with a honeysuckle bunch and enjoyed the breeze and the questions. And then she got up to leave. And then I got up to leave.

And then, about twenty paces away, we met each other on the stoop of Leonard’s residence. She was angling her camera for a shot. I was about to place the honeysuckle on his doorstep. And then we smiled in recognition. We were both pilgrims trying desperately to hold in what we could of the passion bursting from us in that moment so as not to disturb the every-day park goers-- or maybe in a reverence we weren’t sure if he would have expected or not.

“I wonder if he would have wanted this?” Susan said softly, looking into the middle distance. A native New Yorker, she’d felt driven from Manhattan to Montreal for nearly a year-- a year of great loss for her. Since Leonard’s passing, she had clung to his words and music and they did not desert her. So finally, she made the trek. We talked about Leonard’s charisma, his absence, our own connections with him and how the signals went in and out up until this moment. We talked about art and the kind of passion that insists you live life a certain way, even if it appears crazy to those around you.

Susan felt refreshingly bicoastal, vibrant, present and approachable immediately but what was truly beautiful about our moment together at Leonard’s front door was that we could ask the questions we’d been asking ourselves to each other-- someone who really got it-- and think aloud as we tried to process that moment. I accredit that energy between us for drawing one Cohen pilgrim, two more, three, an entire family visiting from Berlin, to the door step with us to share the stoop and take pictures for one another.

The impromptu community was pleasant and heartwarming, but I could tell both Susan and I were ready to keep following our signals. “You have to do this kind of thing on your own,” Susan had said. And I couldn’t agree more.

We did take advantage of our serendipitous meeting though and, at her request, sat on Leonard’s stair and listened to this song together. I’d actually never given it a try. With the backstory and interpretation Susan shared, I couldn’t think of a more perfect song for our moment in nirvana. We smiled in gratitude just to be off of Boogie Street for the time being.

[sincerelyladymidnight]

Day Four //

I spent Day Four feeling very vulnerable and pitying myself because my body wasn’t being a proper ally. I spent it too tenderly bandaging the wounds on my feet. I spent it drunk, slowly, strange perspectives seeping out and leaving slick puddles on the floor for he or I to step in like watercolor landmines. I spent Day Four in unrepentant darkness. And I held it against my lover’s body. And I held it against the walls of this apartment. I held it inside my lungs and took it down in wine not words. This is just to say: Monday is over now.

[sincerelyladymidnight]

[sincerelyladymidnight]

Day Three //

At sundown I weave frantically through Shaar Hashomayim at Mont Royal Cemeterie my pupils wildly dialated, chasing after an “intuition” of where Leonard’s unmarked grave in his family’s plot might lie. My heart pounds, as it is wont to do as the sun goes down and I’m desperately trying to soak up the last lights through the brocade of my retinas. “Where ARE you? Where are you?” Liam takes a methodical (and rational) approach and follows each path looking for key elements of differentiation noted from a photograph in a Montreal Gazette news article, which may or may not be photoshopped. He moves calmly, calling out to let me know his location when he moves into farther corners or more densely plotted rows of larger headstones.

We’d walked from Leonard’s youth to his grave and the significance had to land here in some very poignant, tangible way where I could reach out and place a stone on marble, I thought. It had to.

It did not. We footslogged back down Mont Royale after a five mile journey having no better idea of where in this little congregation cemetery a luminary lay in a simple pine box and the only solace, for me, was that we had fit it all together and walked where he had walked throughout his young life. And the peonies, lavender and lilac along that path, their scent strengthened by petrichor. And the view from the corner of Cote-de-Saint-Antoine as the sun slid like a heavy yolk down through cloudy, soupy post-rain sky to make warm stone blanc glow supernaturally just before the vista. Liam notes that Leonard walked this path from school to congregation. He watched this sunset and took in this vista-- must have.

One moment in the day I fantasize as metaphysical connection with Leonard as we walk back down the mount might be as I sat under a window at Westmount High School, waiting for Liam to take a couple photographs. As I posed awkwardly and a breeze came up, I started humming a tune; one I knew, but out of nowhere. It materialized in my mind slowly like someone turning up a volume dial on an old radio. And then it was coming from my own throat and lips:

They're writing songs of love, but not for me. A lucky star's above, but not for me. With love to lead the way I've found more clouds of gray Than any Russian play could guarantee...

It sounds silly to me now as I write this. Why would I assume he hummed the same tune as he entered this high school? Because it was the late forties? Because I fancy him a foolheaded romantic in his youth, like me?

How long can I keep this up, I asked myself when we returned to the apartment with wooden block legs and aching backs. How sustainable is this fantasy that Leonard is my own personal prophet?

He had a prophet too. The poet Federico Garcia Lorca. Lorca enchanted and seduced Leonard when he was a young man and, he said, he never left Lorca’s world. Leonard wrote the song “Take This Waltz” in homage to the poet. I visualize Lorca as a spiritual guide from aristocracy to gypsy life (affluent, upper middle class Jewish community to gypsy burial of simple pine box in an unmarked grave.

But where is Leonard guiding me? Or is this some superficial crush I’ve embellished for years? .... He’s crush worthy, no doubt. I’m just unsure of why I’m here, exactly. Do I grow my fantasies? Do I force myself to see whole pictures and stark reality at any cost? Do I laugh my romanticism off? Do I keep writing him love letters with my filter set stubbornly to keep out anything that doesn’t nurture my fatasy?

Tomorrow I visit Parc du Portugal, his beloved writing spot. We shall see.

[sincerelyladymidnight]

Today we visit Leonard’s elementary school, his family’s synagogue and his grave. Update to come by midnight....

[sincerelyladymidnight]

Day Two //

I want to tell you about the Jean Baptiste parade as if I wasn’t there, both because I wasn’t-- I was underwater. I was inside the struck bell of blood pressuring my ears, blotting out the jubilant crowd of onlookers, the pedal pub blaring Life is a Highway, the marching band -- and because I don’t know how else to construct this emotional mural but by small strokes I can stand back and away from.

The only specific, confounding image that made its way into cognition materialized as a question. It came calmly and quiety like the voice of god inside the eye of a shit storm. Maybe it came from Liam. It did. I can here it now:

”I’m miserable! You’re miserable!””You’re a bully!””I’m leaving, you can find your own way back.””You’ve broken my trust!””I want to die! I don’t care about anything anymore!”

“Why are there dancing ice cream cones leading this parade?”

”I’m done!”This is over!””If you walk away from me now, you just watch what happens!””Don’t threaten me!”

“I think they are waffle cones. Does that mean something?”

Possible significance through my consistently ridiculous and delusional lens, you ask?: Oh, well, soft serve ice cream is as pure, sweet and innocent as the baby Jean Baptiste, which is why the Holy Spirit chose him as a vessel. Or maybe this perfect summer breeze just doesn’t feel like home to the Quebecoise. They need the cold, even if just in their hand. I made Liam buy us ice cream cones because everyone around us had ice cream cones in their hand and I thought it was symbolic but apparently it is not. The line of choreographed dancing ice cream cones in this parade were just that: dancing ice cream cones.

Here is the story: 

Two lovers traveling light but heavy with mood and history between them search for a particular mural out of many, many beautiful murals on the Plateau. 

The Plateau is full of color and light and sound and happy, curious children. No one is hurting. Ne person pas est triste. There is so much laughter from all directions that maybe the lovers become disoriented. Their disorientation comes from overstimulation. (They regularly require sensory deprivation therapy.) The laughter starts to sound maniacal to them. (They only laugh at their own sardonic commentary.) So they get lost. Then they lose one another. Then there is nothing that can break them apart; like street cats growling. Large cafe windows slide and latch on both sides as they pass. The woman notices but doesn’t understand. The man suggests it’s the volume of their voices or the litany of curse words and personal insults volleying between them. Submersed in the swimming pool of her vascular system, she hadn’t even heard the things they were saying to one another.

They fall into silence of embarrassment and take a side street in shame. The mural they’re looking for is the largest mural but it remains elusive. The eyes of the mural follow the vexed and lonely lovers as they walk silently side by side. But every time they look up, the buildings are blank. So they wander down alleys and try to hold conversation but repeatedly grow weary of each other’s thought processes, each grasping for solutions to this problem of perpetual discombobulation...

Then, finally, he appears. Hat first on the nine story building (as promised by every source the lovers had continuously referenced and argued over) just off of St. Laurent, he is six stories of coyness and unmatched grace. He is early glowing with saintliness, so much so that the woman feels empty-handed. Why hadn’t they brought anything to lay at his feet?

Other people visit the mural. An old man aided by a young woman on his arm, both in all black, stand beneath the mural a long time. Other tourists take photos, of him, of other murals. Things are quieting down on the Plateau. Other lovers sigh and drape their arms around one another. They sit down at sidewalk cafes for un bierre ou un vin rouge to reflect upon their pleasant holiday. And now they are tired, these lovers carrying almost nothing but everything on their minds. And it’s getting late. And they haven’t eaten. So, they decide to climb a mountain.

 Up they go towards the foot of the cross atop Mont Royal, saying nothing. Down come weary revelers and tipsy groups of teenagers. Down come families heading home for dinner. A little girl in a stroller waves her fleur-de-lis flag at the lovers, looking for their own flags. She receives a forced smile and a wave from the woman, which makes her scowl suspiciously, her happy flag signal frozen in place. Her eyes follow them. It’s as if she knows they have ruined Jean Baptiste day for themselves; the happiest goddamn day in this preternaturally happy city. This makes the weary lovers start smiling again. Then laughing. Then their fingers lace here and there as their arms swing. Then they sit side by side halfway up the mountain on a park bench and watch the sky bruise and glow over the loveliest city they’ve ever ruined for each other. The woman lays her head on the man’s shoulder and asks him if he could live here forever with her. 

Ozone rises to their nostrils though there is no rain in sight. It is perfectly clear. They fall into silence again. 

[thefierystatehotel]

Montrealers capture creation of Leonard Cohen mural, stroke by stroke

“An old friend is coming back to the neighbourhood,” one Instagram user wrote, “and it makes me want to cry.”

heading for the mural today….

[sincerelyladymidnight]

Day One///

This morning on the “balcony” (fire escape) having a smoke I pose a question to Leonard, the Leonard who walks just out of reach in my mind’s eye, I said: “I don’t get it, where are you? I can’t feel you.”

And he answered almost immediately with a smile and a drag of his own cigarette: “What did yo expect? This is pretty silly. Come home to me. You called and so I came. Where are you when I need you?”

“Very funny. I’m in Mile End.” A panic refridgerates my vascular system a moment, though the air is already balmy, warm. Oh god, what if I’ve lost signal. What am I doing here?

I wanted a cold coffee and for my hip to stop stinging with weather ache, overindulgent contrapposto and wandering around Old Montreal this morning. I couldn’t find it in me to be a pleasant travel partner until the caffeine had a chance to it’s good work. So I sat in disgruntled silence and Liam scanned his surroundings with precisiom as he’s wont to do. He spotted a little independent used bookstore across St. Viatreau: S.W. Welch bouquiniste. Nothing neutralizes anxious musk hanging in the atmosphere like a good little book shop with a dollar rack out front and Bjork wafting out each time the door opens.

That’s when Leonard decided to show up again, in conversation with the owner, author Vincent Tinguely. Vincent directed me to the Cohen mural I’ll be visiting tomorrow and gave me a beautiful first hand account of sitting in Parc du Portugal after a long day of aparmtnet hunting and spotting Leonard in khaki shorts toting grocery bags back to his place. “There goes the legend,” Vincent thought. He’s written a book on Montreal’s spoken word scene (“Impure: Reinventing the Word,” which I purchased) that features Leonard briefly. Back in the 80s, Vincent attended a spoken word showcase by a poet collective recently shut out of their space. Vincent clearly recalla Leonard strolling over to sit on a curb and take in the local work, calling it the best reading he’d been to.

As Vincent recounted this moment, my heart ached. The heartache is what I’ve come here to understand. Why do I mss this man so much? Vincent explains that Cohen, though as big as the come, was an approachable neighbor and a warm presence till the end. He’d often see Cohen having causal conversations with fans or frequenting his favorite local joints, like the bagel place down the block, without pretense or expectation but to follow his routine.

If this morning Leonard was my own personal adviser, by the time I left Vincent’s shop, there was no sustaining the delusion.

I’m drawn to Leonard like a moth to a flame just like anyone in this neighborhood would be… just like the world was and not because he’s my familiar but because he was spiritually (I believed) endowed with grace, confidence and humility.

I’ll hang on to this magical thinking however, to take out of my pocket when I need him closer. But while I’m here, I’m here to understand the city he loved. And I’ve barely cracked the surface. But S.W. Welch’s was a beautiful start. Thank you, Vincent! I look forward to traveling through this rich spoken word history with you.

[sincerelyladymidnight]

“She steps on the moon when she paws at the sky ... And she comes to his hand but she’s not really tame. She longs to be lost. He longs for the same...” -Leonard Cohen, “Ballad of the Absent Mare”

Say a prayer for the cowboy indeed. He is caught in a feedback loop accelerating he and his beloved mare into an uncertain future where they are bound together in longing for freedom whilst codependent as hell for reasons neither of them really cognize. He is vulnerable in his limitation and his measurements of wounds and punishments and his inability to see her devotion through his own fears. She is bound by conditioning and imprinting and an inability to find direction without a rider. The crickets break his heart. She’s huge but she’s shy. I can’t think of a more tragic pair. And this is just my interpretation. Take a listen and let me know your own....

[sincerelyladymidnight]

You can follow my travel blog here: http://sincerelyladymidnight.tumblr.com

“I have always been attracted to the voluptuousness of austerity. I never chose the style of my life because it hurt. It was on the contrary. I feel most comfortable and most abundant when things are very simple and I know where everything is and there’s nothing around that I don’t need.” - Leonard Cohen

There is a Prologue but it comes last. It isn’t far enough in rear view just yet. So this first post is about small, simple spaces.

Even if there’s an urge to give something more– first impression of this undeniably unique and breathtaking city, something about the small, serious twenty-two year old customs agent who did not smile when I cracked a joke about being finger printed, any backstory to how my travel partner and I ended up renting a car and driving from NYC across the border– trust me when I say that now is not the time.

Now is the time for Jewish deppaneur votives to be lit, for corner flower shop begonias to be dispersed where they bring most pleasure and for the last glass from this “vin rouge RED WINE PRODUCT OF FRANCE” to be swilled. And then it’s time for bed. Tomorrow is written on this yellow legal pad with groupings of idea braced like movements of music, each to be completed by midnight. I don’t know what I’m doing. But each brace feels simple.

And here I am nearing my first midnight in Montreal. It comes on so quickly. If I didn't have the luxury of this yellow pad and a pen I’d worry I was losing something. One day of travel is a long, long story. But one space is a poem. And I can do that, I guess.

This may be the last space of it’s kind living and breathing in the energetically gentrifying neighborhood of Mile End (https://www.mtlblog.com/news/montreal-mile-end-mile-ex.) This what I’ve told myself I’m allowed to assume having just landed in town as a tired and grumpy ex-New Yorker. God bless this crumble and everything that’s smelly or weird about this building. GOD BLESS IT. That’s always home for me.

I saw a cat beneath me in the courtyard who looked as savvy as any New York scavenger. I don’t understand what’s inside these couch cushions. Someone’s dank indica is wafting through our balcony screen door. And there’s no way in hell two people could fit into the galley kitchen together. Our fire escape has a rusted spiral stair. /blog post ….. done. I’m in love. This is the most fitting shoebox of gypsy revelry I’ve ever had the pleasure of bunking in and there’s a beautiful old piano to boot.

Leonard’s austerity might have had a heavier touch of class but my minimalistic writing den smells like free-tilt posturing transients grasping for a home base that leaves them room to create their reality.

This space, made far more aesthetically pleasing, zen and spiritually balanced by my travel partner before our first sun down, boasts the boheme most faux hipster ghettos could only dream of and it’s not even trying.

I set a small altar on the piano. I bang my head against the wall over the spotty WIFI. I nod to the man at the fire escape across from mine and say “bonjour” to the mail lady. From my fire escape perch I watch the long skirts of hasidic mothers swish across one slit of street life persective left just before nightfall. I ‘nuk’ and blink slowly at the courtyard cat. I ask the pizza delivery guy where to find a midnight deppaneur for more wine. But then I just go to bed. I’m so tired.

Tomorrow starts the story. Tonight is just a poem.

[sincerelyladymidnight]

I love this song. I flub the words a bit. I loved this night. I truly believe that when we gather in the name of someone spiritually so present and now passed, they are there in the room with us. The gratitude I felt that night and still feel, to Leonard and to every local artist that stood up at that altar and paid tribute is like nothing I’ve really felt before. I was so honored to be among those with prayers of gratitude and to look out into a room of beautiful humans and feel connected to something peaceful and right in a time where the world felt so wrong and so scary.

[thefierystatehotel]

perdition/”sweetheart”

perdition/”sweetheart”

shannon moore shepherd

easy to lose one’s sense of humor

when no one’s bearing nonsense

but me on the telephone

for hours, my rabbitheart, fallowed

field of scorched grapevines,

fig trees threatening to combust

because your voice.

because your voice.

easy to fall into strange inflection,

try to drop the temperature a couple

degrees single-mindedly–

an experiment, can I grab

the root of this burning bush

before it’s too late and

I can smell your breath or 

you can smell my hair

because a word?

because a word?

hard times call for bottomless bottles 

of vin rouge at this dusty old farmhouse 

table, hay-fever circles under my eyes, 

it looks like this is more 

than I can bear: prodigal with stories 

(your currency) and wasting 

my time and none at all, you 

tell me you’re going to Havana to 

fuck your girlfriend’s tits on a beach–

my Havana, just fuck you. 

easy to find me now leaned over, cool tile

against my cheek, candle still flickering–

fucking nonsense. you always were

and I hate you i hate you i hate you,

every last word of you,

(can’t be conscious here)

because a little death.

because a little death.

hard to recall when we were there last, 

at a cantina where the dusk smelled 

of annonaceae and petrichor. 

we drank El Presidentes until we 

couldn’t sweat, sang Hey Bo Diddley, 

the only clave we knew, assholes, we

knew nothing, just fought  like 

lions in bed, woke under 

quiet sky on Santa Maria del Mar,

bottles washed up beside us 

with no messages.

hard to believe your eyes loved me then,

here now, with this empty leaning shed

and a yellowed map on a bedroom

wall, hard to feel smoke stinging lung or

hear the crow’s warning in a pistachio tree

without putting an ear 

to my grandmother’s pocket watch. 

where am I if not here

and not there just yet?

because you said–

because you said.

[sincerelyladymidnight]

Is This What You Wanted - Shannon Moore Shepherd (Leonard Cohen cover)

A big thank you to my Dad for capturing some moments from the Leonard Cohen tribute show. This is one of my favorite songs off of the album New Skin for the Old Ceremony so I gave it a try that night....

To receive the completed chapbook and accompanying EP (which may include this cover as a “b-side” to be honest) (”Sincerely, Lady Midnight”) to be released this October, throw some cash into the travel fund. I’ll also send ya a postcard and tchotchke from Montreal next week!

[sincerelyladymidnight]

“I think it was about four o'clock in the morning they went in and woke him up in his trailer and he took a long time to get out to the stage. Everybody had been sittin' there in the filth, in their own squalor - half a million people there - for five days. And Leonard finally came out of his trailer and he was wearing his pyjamas...I never have known why they didn't just hoot him off the stage like they did with a lot of people, especially me! I can only think that he was such an honest performer and didn't scramble after anybody's attention. He took his time gettin' out there, he took his time tunin' up and he wasn't intimidated by a half million people who'd been very ugly.” -Kris Kristofferson