On the Impossible Occasion of an Old Leonard Cohen meeting Young Federico García Lorca for Tea in a Buddhist Monastery in the Catskills, 1929

I wash with scrub
in a silence so luxurious,
so still, it is rhapsodic,
almost lewd to my liking.
You think I’m kidding,
do you not young man?
Everything for you is
ensconced on a throne
of deep, and great danger.
Federico, your name’s sake
is the scream, planted green,
green, so heaven-climbing,
green, where walls to earth
and eaves do meet,
where blood spills by moon
and civil hands, cry of gypsies
at their shining leather feet.
My boy. I am peace between 
pebbles thrown into water,
I have women or men
for you if you want them.
My kitchen serves breads
aromatic, soft, and whole
to ease you after your
journey to our America,
and today I wonder, child,
at spirits—what devil or which
talent as forest fire burns
the soul of your pen—rent poor
of metaphor, drained of similes
in verdant Granada today.
What of New York—has
my Andalusian puppy come 
to chide? Dear, we sing! 
Secret chords into each other, 
we please the Muse
and cease our Civil War, 
stamp heels together— 
splintering the cedars
from the naves to the tops—
to the slow, red stops! 
of the Soleá,
and make the weave 
of your pouting, black locks wet 
with fixative to slide 
words smearing unintelligible 
on the page—a wildness asking, 
a pregnancy begged.
Leonard, perhaps men can stop 
making sense of women,
perhaps life becomes less interesting,
perhaps even boring.
Leonard, I want to burn the ark of heaven
dressed in pesetas and prayers.
Give me agency and excess,
give me your disease and prowess,
I want to touch this sexless mystery.
Leonard, today I am the Germans 
who bleed Guernica,
Krakow’s ovens blessing Poland.
I will sit one day in the West
inside the bomb in New Mexico,
I will light the sky with el duende,
the grace and violence of all the poets
riding black horses on a plutonium core
without a door, the sweet life dancing 
inside an eye with no walls slightly smiling,
with no walls broken widely open.