The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly
Page 13
mountains and glens and the snow coming down like dreams
in a silence and in a tiny souvenir.
Crow
Crow shines on a dead branch that may have
lived then and
under which we may have passed.
Our preacher was a demon and the joker
sprinkled down over our wedding a glitter
of rain, perhaps this same cold tiny rain
in the gusts of which the evergreens cast down
amid memory a cherishing.
Oh yes, nobody came to that sad show but the day
and the night, and your train was a train of years.
Since that time I have
by my own count three lives led,
one in magic, one in power, one in peace,
and still
the little wound goes like a well
down into the rotten dark and who
should breathe near there sees dreams
and pales and sickens in a music.
And the crow is not God, and the wind
is not God and nothing is God
that would not break us
for transgressions we made in ignorance.
California
Drove south two days ago
into the mongrel jaywalker onrush
of Los Angeles.
On the way,
stacks of irrigation pipe,
the laughter of
disc jockeys.
Farmhands in a pickup passed,
their glances spilling behind them as
one looked at me
—as if Route 5
had expressed you from the blondeness
of its fields,
its vast incomprehensible agriculture
finding itself in the numb openness
of your face:
tonight, beneath the moths—tears roll down the radio.
And you get drunk, and your scars are dancing…
Visits
Today, Carl and I took
another look at the orderly dead.
On Wednesdays before the alcoholic
rap group at the County Jail
across Low Gap Road, we often cruise
these old graveyard rows, reading
the brief, inexplicable stories twisted off
by cholera and tossed down here at our feet.
The shortest lives have the shortest graves,
the little brothers and sisters,
three and five and six, dead
in the month of May, beside the World War
comrades who all went away at once,
and the three superannuated wives
of a doctor who must have known
something, at least, because he outlived them all.
Oh, my lovely friend,
moss is coming
to fill our names…
Carl
is getting kind of old, and sometimes
he mumbles and forgets. Carl, don’t.
Don’t die.
Let’s turn our backs on the dead
and cross the road to where the living,
incarcerated in their orange
jumpsuits, mark off their days.
The inmates look like children
in their brilliant clothes,
peeking up out of their living graves.
But tonight, pushing
the heavy words like ballast out of his mouth,
Ron told us:
“I’ve got seven foot
of scar. I been dead three times.”
The men had some kind of, I don’t know, raped
feeling to them. I got mad.
I refused them my pity. I’ll save it
for the people you hurt to get here, I said.
When I got home to Anchor Bay
I wandered idiotically
past the house where I’m not supposed to live,
staggered through the meadow, ignorant
of the lovely walnut tree, ignorant of the moon,
and went in
to the horses and held the new colt in the pissed-on stalls.
This creature will live. He’s nursing now. A frost
of colostrum trembles on his lips,
dribbling from the teats
of Infinity, his mother, and staining the dust.
Right now I could go to the friend
who, a long time ago, when Michelle
and I were two crippled babies,
fucked her
because he was thirsty,
and say
I just want you to smell the rain
on this straw.
Drink
When I woke up this morning
the lark was full of tears.
White, bright hail was frying
on the grass.
Now up against the wire
the falcon wrecks the hen
and carries her gray heart
over the redwoods while the new
sun burns on the former rain.
Crossed by her shadow, my hand
cupped beneath the spigot,
I am drinking last year’s snow.
How bad it hurts
that the mountains ascend
to their ghost-deals white
with the wine of next summer.
A Saint
I’m drinking tea, looking out over Santa Monica,
and listening to the old songs.
I’ve spent the day with Hollywooders,
and they really are beautiful people,
charming and a little afraid. “Don’t you need love?”
the song asks now. Oh yes,
I suppose I do need love, and I suppose
I’m as scared and probably as charming, in some moments,
as any person I’ve met today.
Here I have to mention the white statue
of Santa Monica on the shore, resolutely turned
toward the city and all our frightened hearts,
away from the Pacific, showing her back to blueness,
to homeless distance, questions, formlessness,
and toward those very same things embodied—
even formlessness embodied—
in the eyes and hands of the hustlers deigning to work
their Murphies on the Martians from the Shangri-la.
For her, if not for me, these
are the degraded Christ. And too
the reincarnate, self-invented, pure
ones tanning in the timelessness, Omegas
singing
in the sand beside their heads.
It is as if Saint Monica’s beautiful love
had conjured up quite negligently this ocean
of which she is ignorant,
as if what she loves in us
had been pressed from us like wine and flooded the world.
Now the distances are filled with it, and ships
sail on it and there are countries
all around it, and organizations weeping…
Ulysses
The hull of the knife and the surf
of our hurting
The outrigger of the bullet and the whitecaps
of our mistakes
The Commander of Suicide
and the archipelago
of the mirror
Ocean and Wilshire
The jogging women
of Santa Monica
I like to get near them
as they go past
because they smell
like heated-up perfume
I try to get
inside their eyes
Santa Monica
mother of St. Augustine
mother of prayers
a guy is scraping
xmas snowflakes
from the window with
a putty knife
I would have raped you
seething like an ocean in your bed
Santa Monica
wh
ile you prayed
Grocery on Venice Beach
Thank you salesperson I see your heart
quivering redly in its gossamer
I with this fiery whirling atomic
symbol where I used to have a stomach
lighting my dead shoes
down the aisle
Briefly the gauzy but legible
future veils the place and is beheld
I can talk inside the mind
of my great-grandchild Oh unconceived
monster hurting your teeth on our dead Disneylands
we were here we touched this radioactive food
We didn’t have claws then something in our hearts sufficed
We didn’t have X-ray eyes we knew what
was inside of everything
Descendants
I have paid and I have left
walked out of the little store onto a white beach
the light declining and lavender
walked past two women
as they knelt covered with gooseflesh
beside the Tarot dealer
past a man pretending to be a machine in a circle
of laughter
alongside but not too close
to the people who no longer
live indoors or hide their thoughts
past the child
born in a towaway zone
the mother’s eyes like
a creek
numbers
and curses going by in the water
I leave you this record
of an invisible monstrosity and this
report of sadness
a semi-truck against the bruised roses
of sunset
emeralds in the velvet wound
the lights
of Malibu the cold
small lights
On the Morning of a Wedding
At the barber—
he shaves you with that razor—
but starting with the acceptable rightness
thru the historic sensuality,
bestower
of an antique masculinity:
denting then pulling my throat’s thin
covering with his left hand’s fingers,
in his right
the razor—like
a wand he touches it
to the air; lowers it to my throat; and then—
If I were a murderer—
not in the way we all are, but the other way—
please let my barber never have killed anyone
when he kills me.
Blessing
Christ by the dumpster peeling and tossing
your lottery tickets—oh Nazarene drinking dust, oh
Christ rising and falling, oh Jesus
Christ giving us the finger in “Christ au tambeau,”
bless please the people in art galleries
lonely as a distant train. Bless now
the cancer of the bone, the last light making
beautiful the poisons in the sky—
and the condemned man in his tuxedo dream,
his dream of limousines and innocence,
take off your clothes and come to him in dreams,
stand on the fire escape naked and bless
with jazz like a rivulet of codeine
the laughter spilling from our broken necklaces.
Orchard
I was a child,
the president of a world of toys.
—awake in the dark, but not the dark
of childhood, because the grownups’ talk
(and the murmur of my grandmother and the senile
voice of the porch swing’s chain, irrelevantly
assenting to whatever they should say
about a life that seemed—while frames of light
wheeled along the walls as cars went by—
a wooly cartoon maelstrom that had put them
unharmed and tired and a little drunk
there on the porch, as I had been put to bed)
turned the childhood dark to grownup dark.
I myself am the Tacomas I have known,
streets collapsing into planes of black and silver,
I one outcome of Portland
and its jeunes filles
scarred by the pretty rain,
cars dealt out around the gas stations,
girls kneeling in prayer by the phones,
—but
loveless save as now when on my knees
and spangled by broken blossoms in the orchard
I breathe the terrible silence of the unfutured,
the pastless,
burned by the silences of tears,
the twenty-six silences of our fate,
the twelve kinds of silence in the apple-petal,
and burned by the Lover
and Utterer of those silences,
made a choir of flame and then blown away
like a blossom. I am these petals—nothing
more than what I see or where I am,
nothing—a trick of twilight, wind, and flowers.
Where the Failed Gods Are Drinking
Virgin stranded on the tennis court
at dawn: her little skirt as still, as white, as marble…
In such forlornness men sink themselves,
following its current out past their lives…
oceanic nauseating
depths drifting us
down alongside the islands where love
clasped us to itself and delivered our drowning—
mountains and a day and a cloud
in a barnyard: no larger than an egg, a puff of mist
drives like musket smoke out
of the peacock’s blue throat
along with its effeminate scream.
Ah! oh! ow!—
waiting to be born
We pass the island of the war and the hour
we lay bleeding and one of those tropic flies
landed and its freaked-out golden eyes
looked at the light This man
remembers how he set out
to find others who were like him
but was broken like a claw at dinner
He comes to Santa Monica
where people with their faces
stuck on proudly climb
the moment to its mountain loneliness
the world
a window they might shoulder past
in expectation of some gift of the street
He cries I’m blind again
It’s true
For shame is its own veil
For shame is its own veil and veils
the world as much as the face—
smells and songs make sadness
and everyone walking toward you
holding in each mouth a word
an answer
How does it taste
this secret the whole world is keeping from me
I just a poor mortal human having stumbled onto
the glen where the failed gods are drinking
stand here almost remembering my birth
and the trees too are beautiful and dead
About the Author
DENIS JOHNSON was born in 1949 in Munich, Germany. He has received many awards for his work, including a Lannan Fellowship in Fiction and a Whiting Writer’s Award. He lives in northern Idaho.
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Also by Denis Johnson
THE MAN AMONG THE SEALS
INNER WEATHER
THE INCOGNITO LOUNGE
THE VEIL
ANGELS
FISKADORO
THE STARS AT NOON
RESUSCITATION OF A HANGED MAN
JESUS’ SON
Copyright
THE THRONE OF THE THIRD HEAVEN OF THE NATIONS MILLENNIUM GENERAL ASSEMBLY. Copyright © 1969, 1976, 1982, 1987, 1995 by Denis Johnson. All rights reserved
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EPub © Edition FEBRUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780061869549
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