I am going through a song phase. Every once in a while I go through a song phase, or a poem phase that lasts until I wear out the song a bit, but before I do so, I wish to capture the latest one here. A few days ago it was 'a long and winding road'.
The current one is 'Take this waltz' by Leonard Cohen and I discovered it very recently, and it has grown on me. Helps that it is a poem too (by Spanish poet Lorca), which took Cohen somewhere around 150 hrs to translate to get it just right in English. I am not sure whether I get the poem completely - I get the mood, the tone, and I love the pace and the way it is set to song. And like all haunting poems, this one too lives on love and loss.
Probably it is the Rebecca West that I'm reading (her journey through Czechoslovakia, and its constant reference to Vienna). I am enjoying this on loop. And since it's that part of the phase where I need to tell everyone I meet to listen to this song, I am sharing it here (since this song is a poem too). Until I decide better, here goes:
Now in Vienna there are ten pretty women
There's a shoulder where Death comes to cry
There's a lobby with nine hundred windows
There's a tree where the doves go to die
There's a piece that was torn from the morning
And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost
Aey, aey, aey, aey
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz with the clamp on its jaws
Oh, I want you, I want you, I want you
On a chair with a dead magazine
In the cave at the tip of the lilly
In some hallway where love's never been
On a bed where the moon has been sweating
In a cry filled with footsteps and sand
Aey, aey, aey, aey
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take its broken waist in your hand
This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz
With its very own breath of brandy and Death
Dragging its tail in the sea
There's a concert hall in Vienna
Where your mouth had a thousand reviews
There's a bar where the boys have stopped talking
They've been sentenced to death by the blues
Ah, but who is it climbs to your picture
With a garland of freshly cut tears?
Aey, aey, aey, aey
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz, it's been dying for years
There's an attic where children are playing
Where I've got to lie down with you soon
In a dream of Hungarian lanterns
In the mist of some sweet afternoon
And I'll see what you've chained to your sorrow
All your sheep and your lillies of snow
Aey, aey, aey, aey
Take this waltz, take this waltz
With its "I'll never forget you, you know"
This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz
With its very own breath of brandy and Death
Dragging its tail in the sea
And I'll dance with you in Vienna
I'll be wearing a river's disguise
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder
My mouth on the dew of your thighs
And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook
With the photographs there, and the moss
And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty
My cheap violin and my cross
And you'll carry me down on your dancing
To the pools that you lift on your wrist
Oh my love, oh my love
Take this waltz, take this waltz
It's yours now, it's all that there is