The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly

by Denis Johnson

  visions as these fine hairs—

  blossoms, really, these little

  originations of life in

  the parched world, this excellent

  sparse grove that is lucked on,

  never sought and found, just here

  above the navel, just here where

  I touch for one second

  and then I must recover.

  Also, if my good luck is not

  yet quite too far beyond

  that prudently afforded

  my sort, I would like

  to have several more

  of these buttocks, precisely

  duplicated, naturally

  presenting as it fades this pale

  impression of my fingers

  on the left one. And may I have

  the bodies with them, too? This

  is actually the most unnerving

  and celestial of girls, it’s

  not enough that she was in

  the living room now as I entered,

  why couldn’t she have been in

  the room I just left, as well

  as all the other rooms at once?

  Do you see what foul lurches

  underproduction leaves us in?

  And so suppose this girl were

  to become lost? Lost! Would you

  want to witness my running

  into all the rooms exclaiming

  year after year Whatever

  shall I do? Lately I have been

  noticing how everything

  loved must reach the touch

  of grief to the lover—it is

  an unusual prize geranium

  that does not die—but perhaps

  one or two more of this girl,

  of course with these arresting—

  oh, my, these prosecuting

  and sentencing!—thin arms,

  each finely braceleted or

  just plain covered with twenty-

  dollar bills, emeralds, alarm

  devices and this bewildering

  soft skin could be managed?

  Vespers

  The towels rot and disgust me on this damp

  peninsula where they invented mist

  and drug abuse and taught the light to fade,

  where my top-quality and rock-bottom heart

  cries because I’ll never get to kiss

  your famous knees again in a room made

  vague by throwing a scarf over a lamp.

  Things get pretty radical in the dark:

  the sailboats on the inlet sail away;

  the provinces of actuality

  crawl on the sea; the dusk now tenderly

  ministers to the fallen parking lots—

  the sunset instantaneous on the fenders,

  memory and peace…the grip of chaos…

  The Story

  Dunking one

  adjacent a disturbed

  old woman in the elevated

  train station donut shop,

  you think: Heavenly lady,

  I’m drinking coffee

  and you’re dripping mucus,

  is that the story?—but say nothing,

  fearing either reply. Curious

  days, these, spent

  in fear of replies, in horror

  of doorways, sleep, friendships,

  and what napkins!—wordless

  white interrogations wanting

  the whole story, again,

  from the beginning;

  napkins like the vast, anemic

  dawns that find you awake

  by the window, trying to

  remember how it goes,

  failing: the disastrously loved

  one’s face some Martian’s

  now, the swell architecture of the old

  houses similarly permutating

  in memory’s half-light,

  and boxes?—What

  can you do save drift

  motherless through these tears when

  the cardboard box remembers

  the legend of the distant

  store in a cool dry place

  where all are freed of desire

  and change, the fat man

  simply standing, selling

  nothing, the others silent,

  every edge gleaming

  with the perfect, acrylic veneer

  of reality? But does a box

  dream, or is it you who dreams,

  and is this truly a dream of reality

  or only a memory of sanity?

  Turn around. Look back. Now

  remember: there they drank wine

  with you a last time,

  there they cried with you a last time,

  now the shelter is only a hailstone

  that fell there,

  for already they’ve folded away the voices,

  already they’ve put away the light,

  now that this one

  whom we told

  nothing

  goes away saying I hear your words,

  I will seek these things,

  I will know by these signs.

  Surreptitious Kissing

  I want to say that

  forgiveness keeps on

  dividing, that hope

  gives issue to hope,

  and more, but of course I

  am saying what is

  said when in this dark

  hallway one encounters

  you, and paws and

  assaults you—love

  affairs, fast lies—and you

  say it back and we

  blunder deeper, as would

  any pair of loosed

  marionettes, any couple

  of cadavers cut lately

  from the scaffold,

  in the secluded hallways

  of whatever is

  holding us up now.

  From a Berkeley Notebook

  One changes so much

  from moment to moment

  that when one hugs

  oneself against the chill

  air at the inception

  of spring, at night,

  knees drawn to chin,

  he finds himself in the arms

  of a total stranger,

  the arms of one he might move

  away from on the dark playground.

  Also, it breaks the heart

  that the sign revolving like

  a flame above the gas

  station remembers the price

  of gas, but forgets entirely

  this face it has been

  looking at all day.

  And so the heart is exhausted

  that even in the face

  of the dismal facts we wait

  for the loves of the past

  to come walking from the fire,

  the tree, the stone, tangible

  and unchanged and repentant

  but what can you do.

  Half the time I think

  about my wife and child,

  the other half I think how

  to become a citizen

  with an apartment, and sex

  too is quite on my mind,

  though it seems the women

  have no time for you here,

  for which in my larger, more

  mature moments I can’t blame them.

  These are the absolute

  pastures I am led to:

  I am in Berkeley, California,

  trapped inside my body,

  I am the secret my body

  is going to keep forever,

  as if its secret were

  merely silence. It lies

  between two mistakes

  of the earth,

  the San Andreas

  and Hayward faults,

  and at night from

  the hill above the stadium

  where I sleep,

  I can see the yellow

  aurora of Telegraph

  Avenue uplifted

 
; by the holocaust.

  My sleeping

  bag has little

  cowboys lassoing bulls

  embroidered all over

  its pastel inner

  lining, the pines are tall

  and straight, converging

  in a sort of roof

  above me, it’s nice,

  oh loves, oh loves, why

  aren’t you here? Morgan,

  the pyjamas are so

  lonesome without

  the orangutans—I write

  and write, and transcend

  nothing, escape

  nothing, nothing

  is truly born from me,

  yet magically it’s better

  than nothing—I know

  you must be quite

  changed by now, but you

  are just the same, too,

  like those stars that keep

  shining for a long time after

  they go out—but it’s just a light

  they touch us with this

  evening amid the fine

  rain like mist, among the pines.

  On the Olympic Peninsula

  Stranger, to one like you,

  here only the old

  people feel like talking—

  but abruptly, as if already in the midst

  of talk, as if they sensed

  with you a kinship in closeness

  to endings—and you aren’t kind

  with them. Stranger,

  here the sea doesn’t obliterate,

  but just lies there carved up

  into bays and inlets, indolent

  or waiting. In the town’s one

  hip bar the lesbians lean

  into sinister embraces, dancing

  together and speaking just softly

  enough that you can’t hear. Your girl

  is gone and you are here

  because you think maybe they

  have taken her from you

  into this establishment where the men

  stink like murdered sea animals;

  they have flying beards, black

  mouths they spill the beer

  into over their laughter

  so that you think of someone urinating on coals.

  Sometimes you unexpectedly taste

  the inside of your own mouth, choking

  as you kiss this bitter foreigner,

  and you feel yourself forgetting, even as you remember,

  that you’ve gone strange and everybody

  else is happy and just having

  good clean fun in a place where the ocean

  is large and cares nothing for men,

  that you are an image of blood

  graven amid peace and wine,

  a strange one,

  claustrophobic and heart-stopped among

  garden parks through which boys

  jog perspiring in their red basketball

  shorts and in which toddlers

  in blue parkas on toy horses rock themselves,

  already stupefied, toward oblivion.

  A Woman

  There’s nobody here

  but you, sitting under

  the window at the corner

  table as if waiting

  for somebody to speak,

  over your left shoulder the moon,

  behind your head a vagina,

  in pencil, emblazoned

  above a telephone number.

  For two hours you’ve been

  looking across the street,

  quite hard, at the grand store,

  the Shopper’s Holiday felled

  across the sunset.

  It grows dark in this climate

  swiftly: the night

  is as sudden and vacuous

  as the paper sack the attendant

  balloons open with a shake

  of his scarred wrist,

  and in the orange parking

  lot’s blaze of sulphur

  arc lamps, each fist

  of tissue paper is distinct,

  all cellophane edged

  with a fiery light that seems

  the white heat of permanence

  and worth; of reality;

  at this hour, and in this

  climate where how swiftly

  the dark grows, and the time comes.

  Now

  Whatever the foghorns are

  the voices of feels terrible

  tonight, just terrible, and here

  by the window that looks out

  on the waters but is blind, I

  have been sleeping,

  but I am awake now.

  In the night I watch

  how the little lights

  of boats come out

  to us and are lost again

  in the fog wallowing on the sea:

  it is as if in that absence not many

  but a single light gestures

  and diminishes like meaning

  through speech, negligently

  adance to the calling

  of the foghorns like the one

  note they lend from voice

  to voice. And so does my life tremble,

  and when I turn from the window

  and from the sea’s grief, the room

  fills with a dark

  lushness and foliage nobody

  will ever be plucked from,

  and the feelings I have

  must never be given speech.

  Darkness, my name is Denis Johnson,

  and I am almost ready to

  confess it is not some awful

  misunderstanding that has carried

  me here, my arms full of the ghosts

  of flowers, to kneel at your feet;

  almost ready to see

  how at each turning I chose

  this way, this place and this verging

  of ocean on earth with the horns claiming

  I can keep on if only I step

  where I cannot breathe. My coat

  is leprosy and my dagger

  is a lie; must I

  shed them? Do I have

  to end my life in order

  to begin? Music, you are light.

  Agony, you are only what tips

  me from moment to moment, light

  to light and word to word,

  and I am here at the waters

  because in this space between spaces

  where nothing speaks,

  I am what it says.

  THREE

  Ten Months After Turning Thirty

  We’ve been to see a movie, a rotten one

  that cost four dollars, and now we slip

  in a cheap car along expensive streets

  through a night broken open like a stalk

  and offering up a sticky, essential darkness,

  just as the terrible thing inside of me,

  the thick green vein of desire or whatever it was,

  is broken and I can rest.

  Maybe in another place and time, people

  drive slowly past the taverns

  with black revolvers reaching from their windows,

  but here in the part of night where every

  breath is a gift tremendous as the sea,

  thousands of oleanders wave

  blossoms like virgins after a war.

  I can hear my own scared laughter coming back

  from desolate rooms where the light-bulbs

  lunge above the radios all night,

  and I apologize now to those

  rooms for having lived in them. Things

  staggered sideways a while. Suddenly

  I’m stretched enough to call certain of my days

  the old days, remembering how we burned

  to hear of the destruction of the world,

  how we hoped for it until many of us were dead,

  the most were lost, and a couple lucky

  enough to stand terrified outside the walls

  of Jerusal
em knowing things we never learned.

  In a Light of Other Lives

  It’s raining, and the streetlights on the wet

  street are like regurgitated lights,

  but the ambulance’s ruby element

  can move among our rooms without a care,

  so that we who generally sleep

  where it is black awaken in a red

  light of other lives, saying I

  can see every article,

  I can see every article in its fame.

  Saying How long do I stay here in the jail

  of times like this, where the clear

  water has the flavor of thirst

  and the meat tastes like it is eating me

  and the day’s bread changes into a face?

  Where sometimes you see the sorrow of a whole life

  open away from you white as an invitation

  on the blue of night, and the moon is a monster?

  All the night long I can betray myself in the honky-tonk

  of terror and delight, I can throw away my faith,

  go loose in the spectacular fandango

  of emergencies that strum the heart

  with neon, but I can’t

  understand anything. It is coming:

  the curtains of rain and light the arc lamps

  let down on First Avenue will be parted,

  and from behind them, the people we really are will step out

  with abandon, as if asked to dance—

  the myriad tickets will fall away from the face

  and the visions of the heart be delivered up naked

  and lucid as teeth, and each

  of the things that catch up with this robber

  will fall on God: now You must follow

  the spoor of Your own blood among

  edifices, among monuments, until the police

  have You in their arms

  and make You say Your name.

  I want to be there when the little pool of light

  falls on the identification,

  I swear I will never tell the others if You whisper

  to me what this moment is before the ambulances,