In the hospital waiting room, seated in my plastic chair,
I think about Leonard Cohen and start quietly to cry.
I'm glad no one is watching, because I can see

the childish indulgence of it all—the displacement of my personal self-pity
onto the cadaverous Canadian singer
whom one critic called "the world's leading producer
                                                                 of songs advocating suicide."

Yet it comes from somewhere deep, this sobbing
sympathy for Leonard Cohen,
and I don't care if it's dishonest, there is nourishment

in these wet tears. I sense
I'm irrigating my own dirty life
with something clean and fresh, like rain, from far away.

Still, crying is violent and weird and hard.
It is like pulling something free from something else
that doesn't want to give it up,
and keeps on pulling back with a wheezing, ripping sound.

Outside the window,
it's not quite sleeting in the gray morning
and I see umbrellas popping open far below;

the sidewalks slowly growing dark and stained with wet,
as cabs speed through the gloom with headlights on.

I'm not doing that well in this waiting room today,
but I'm glad that Leonard Cohen is here,
because I feel like I'm stuck half inside and half out

of one of his songs —
a place where angels have not been seen in years;
where ugliness presents itself with a kind of roguish charm.

In the reflection of the window,
I see his face — his furrowed mouth, the wet black eyes
and that great curved hatchet of a nose:

an expert witness on the death of God;
a master at the art of being broken
in order to be made.

Who would have imagined?
Me in the hospital, with Leonard Cohen,
and still too ignorant to die;

still trying to learn a few of these fundamental things
before the pallbearers arrive:

What Grief Is Good For;
What Imagination Can and Cannot Do.
How to work with this suspicion
that I am the one responsible

for letting the dove out of the coffin.