In the Waiting Room with Leonard Cohen: A Selection from Tony Hoagland’s Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God (2018)

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.

—Tony Hoagland, “In the Waiting Room with Leonard Cohen,” Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God (2018)