Leonard Cohen
"Death Of A Ladies' Man" lyrics

Death Of A Ladies' Man

Ah the man she wanted all her life
Was hanging by a thread
"I never even knew how much
I wanted you" she said
His muscles they were numbered
And his style was obsolete
"O baby, I have come too late"
She knelt beside his feet

"I'll never see a face like yours
In years of men to come
I'll never see such arms again
In wrestling or in love"
And all his virtues burning
In the smoky Holocaust
She took unto herself
Most everything her lover lost

Now the master of this landscape
He was standing there at the view
With a sparrow of St. Francis
That he was preaching to
She beckoned to the sentry
Of his high religious mood
She said, "I'll make a place between my legs
I'll show you solitude"

He offered her an orgy
In a many mirrored room
He promised her protection
For the issue of her womb
She moved her body hard
Against a sharpened metal spoon
She stopped the bloody rituals
Of passage to the moon

She took his much admired
Oriental frame of mind
And the heart-of-darkness alibi
His money hides behind
She took his blonde Madonna
And his monastery wine
"This mental space is occupied
And everything is mine"

He tried to make a final stand
Beside the railway track
She said, "The art of longing's over
And it's never coming back"
She took his tavern parliament
His cap, his cocky dance
She mocked his female fashions
And his working-class moustache

Now the last time that I saw him
He was trying hard to get
A woman's education
But he's not a woman yet
And the last time that I saw her
She was living with some boy
Who gives her soul an empty room
And gives her body joy

So the great affair is over
But whoever would have guessed
It would leave us all so vacant
And so deeply unimpressed
It's like our visit to the moon
Or to that other star
I guess you go for nothing
If you really want to go that far

It's like our visit to the moon
Or to that other star
I guess you go for nothing
If you really want to go that far

It's like our visit to the moon
Or to that other star
I guess you go for nothing
If you really want to go that far