Death of a Lady's Man
by Leonard Cohen
The man she wanted all her life
was hanging by a thread.
“I never even knew how much
I wanted you,” she said.
His muscles they were numbered
and his style was obsolete.
“O baby, I have come too late.”
She knelt beside his feet.
“I’ll never see a face like yours
in years of men to come,
I’ll never see such arms again
in wrestling or in love.”
And all his virtues burning
in the smoky holocaust,
she took unto herself
most everything her lover lost.
Now the master of this landscape
he was standing at the view
with a sparrow of St. Francis
that he was preaching to.
She beckoned to the sentry
of his high religious mood.
She said, “I’ll make a space between my legs,
I’ll teach you solitude.”
He offered her an orgy
in a many-mirrored room;
he promised her protection
for the issue of her womb.
She moved her body hard
against a sharpened metal spoon,
she stopped the bloody rituals
of passage to the moon.
She took his much-admired
oriental frame of mind
and the heart-of-darkness alibi
his money hides behind.
She took his blonde madonna
and his monastery wine.
"This mental space is occupied
and everything is mine"
He tried to make a final stand
beside the railway track.
She said "the art of longing's over
and it's never coming back"
She took his tavern parliament,
his cap, his cocky dance;
she mocked his female fashions
and his working-class moustache.
The last time that I saw him
he was trying hard to get
a woman's education
but he's not a woman yet.
And the last time that I saw her
She was living with a boy
who gives her soul an empty room
and gives her body joy.
So the great affair is over
but whoever would have guessed
it would leave us all so vacant
and so deeply unimpressed.
It's like out visit to the moon
or to that other star:
I guess you go for nothing
if you really want to go that far.
-from Death of a Lady's Man, 1978
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