For the anniversary of the passing of Leonard Cohen:

One Way to Say Goodbye

He passes away while democracy falters
on its way to the USA, just before the holiday
for Hydra’s patron saint. The same
bells ring, the same processions are made,
the same these priests have been making for centuries.
The poets and writers and drifters of the sixties
are gone. No one plays a guitar under the pine tree
at Dousko’s now that the tourists, too, are gone for the winter.
The electricity he lamented and running water
have stayed so the few restaurants play
recordings of Bird on a Wire and Hey, That’s No Way
for me and the priests. Tea and oranges, flowers
and pomegranates multiply at his door. Who am I here,
a poet after the poets and writers and drifters
have disappeared? This is the way
I have always listened to Leonard Cohen anyway,
on my own processions through streets,
sitting in doorways under the moon,
alone in a room. Here are the rooms
where he wrote songs I traveled through
when I was sick for a decade, over the wall
is the terrace from the photograph I studied:
Leonard Cohen playing guitar in the eighties
after the other poets and writers, the drifters were gone,
Leonard Cohen singing to the rooftops, to the mountain.

In November 2016, in the shellshocked first days after the election of Donald Trump, I found myself in Athens, vacillating on whether to make a pilgrimage to the island of Hydra. I have had lifelong health problems, and short side trips tire me out more than they might the average person, though these days I manage a remarkable amount of physical activity when staying in one place. Beyond that caution, however, was a deeper hesitation: whether to set foot in a place that had lived in my imagination since adolescence, when I encountered the music of Leonard Cohen.

I have been fortunate to travel enough of the world to learn that seeing a place that played a significant role in the creation of a favorite artist’s work carries almost as much risk as meeting that artist himself. A land that functions as a kind of origin myth becomes instead a stop in the gritty experiment of one’s own life. When I was a teenager, I had studied the various black and white photographs of Leonard Cohen in Hydra in a faded, secondhand songbook of his music, particularly intrigued by one photograph of him playing guitar alone on his terrace looking out over the rooftops, in the opposite direction from the sea. By the time that book found its way into my hands, Cohen had already long been saying that Hydra, the “laboratory of [his] youth,” was no longer the island it had been to him, but rather just another place, like most others in the world. I often read that Hydra was now an upscale destination of boutique shops, a playground for the superrich to dock their yachts, hardly accessible to the assortment of writers, singers and drifters that had offered Cohen community in the moment when his talent was blossoming.

The reality that Hydra’s days of bohemian utopia were long past was not the only reason the island seemed distant when I studied the photographs in that songbook as a teenager: at that time in my life, I was not healthy enough to travel. If I did become so, I told myself, I would have to do it as Cohen had—go somewhere and stay a long while, to minimize the physical difficulty of traveling to and fro—but I would have to find my own Hydras.

I did, eventually, become healthy enough to travel, but I hadn’t found a place or a community quite like I imagined Hydra to have been. And now, here I was in Athens, after a few weeks in quiet Crete, the noise of the city compounding the shock of the election, in those first days when it felt as if someone had died. And, suddenly, I decided that I did want to see Hydra.

I booked a hotel, and a ferry for the morning, and I tried to go to sleep. In the morning, as I rose to leave, I learned that someone had died indeed: Leonard Cohen.

Maia Evrona

One Way to Say Goodbye