Leonard Cohen playing the restored Beacon Theatre in NYC

The Beacon Theatre was designated by Chicago architect Walter W. Ahlschlager and opened in 1928. The 2,800-seat Beacon Theater is a fantastic Art Deco treasure, built as silent pictures began talking and as vaudeville capitulated to the movie palace era. In 1979, the historic venue was designated a national landmark. The three-level auditorium is distinguished by 30-foot statues of Greek women on each side of the proscenium arch. Other features include an open-air lobby, bronze front doors, ornate moldings, white marble floors, and corridor murals depicting elephants, camels and traders. Known for its flawless acoustics,

:Rolling Stone Review
:Leonard Cohen at the Beacon Theater, NYC-Tonight

This Is For You

This is for you
it is my full heart
it is the book I meant to read you
when we were old
Now I am a shadow
I am restless as an empire
You are the woman
who released me
I saw you watching the moon
you did not hesitate
to love me with it
I saw you honouring the wind-flowers
caught in the rocks
you loved me with them
At night I saw you dance alone
on the small wet pebbles
of the shoreline
and you welcomed me into the circle
more than a guest
All this happened
in the truth of time
in the truth of flesh
I saw you with a child
you brought me to this perfume
and his visions
without demand of blood
On so many wooden tables
adorned with food and candles
a thousand sacraments
which you carried in your basket
I visited my clay
I visited my birth
and you guarded my back
as I became small
and frightened enough
to be born again
I wanted you for your beauty
and you gave me more than yourself
you shared your beauty
this I only learned tonight
as I recall the mirrors
you walked away from
after you had given them
whatever they claimed
for my initiation
Now I am a shadow
I long for the boundaries
of my wandering
and I move
with the energy of your prayer
and I move
in the direction of your prayer
for you are kneeling
like a bouquet
in a cave of a bone
behind my forehead
and I move toward a love
you have dreamed for me

Leonard Cohen

:couleurs via flickr

Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic til Im gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
Dance me to the end of love...

Leonard Cohen

"You will never untangle the circumstances that brought you to this moment."

La Tierra Giró para Acercarnos

The earth turned to bring us closer,
it spun on itself and within us,
and finally joined us together in this dream as written in the Symposium.
Nights passed by, snowfalls and solstices; time passed in minutes and millennia
An ox cart that was on its way to Nineveh arrived in Nebraska.
A rooster was singing some distance from the world, in one of the thousand
pre-lives of our fathers.
The earth was spinning with its music
carrying us on board;
it didn't stop turning a single moment
as if so much love, so much that's miraculous was only an adagio written long
ago in the Symposium's score.

from
The Trees
Selected Poems 1967-2004
Eugenio Montejo



*Leonard Cohen quoting from the Bhagavad Gita

Song

The naked weeping girl
is thinking of my name
turning my bronze name
over and over
with the thousand fingers
of her body
anointing her shoulders
with the remembered odour
of my skin

O I am the general
in her history
over the fields
driving the great horses
dressed in gold cloth
wind on my breastplate
sun in my belly

May soft birds
soft as a story to her eyes
protect her face from my enemies
and vicious birds
whose sharp wings
were forged in metal oceans
guard her room
from my assassins

And night deal gently with her
high stars maintain the whiteness
of her uncovered flesh

And may my bronze name
touch always her thousand fingers
grow brighter with her weeping
until I am fixed like a galaxy
and memorized
in her secret and fragile skies.

Leonard Cohen
: New York Times