Read The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly Online
Authors: Denis Johnson
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 youâlove
affairs, fast liesâand 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.
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 orangutansâI write
and write, and transcend
nothing, escape
nothing, nothing
is truly born from me,
yet magically it's better
than nothingâI 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 outâbut it's just a light
they touch us with this
evening amid the fine
rain like mist, among the pines.
Stranger, to one like you,
here only the old
people feel like talkingâ
but abruptly, as if already in the midst
of talk, as if they sensed
with you a kinship in closeness
to endingsâand 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.
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.
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.
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 Jerusalem knowing things we never learned.
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 danceâ
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,
and what these moments are
when all that was impending
begins, when the whole
downtown, arrested like a lung
between intake and expulsion, erupts
into genuinenessâas if many
bells have been struck and what
the world is, is that I can touch
their ringing. It is unbreakable.
It is the examiner before whom the emptiness
inside me perjures itself.
It is the examiner who is a fist.
At left, with a net, in a light
like whiskey, you skim flotsam
from the water.
I can't tell you how vivid
this undertaking isâ
you are as unsettling
and as naked as that yellow
flower admiring you as it rests
along the surface of the pool.
I am just going to listen
to the sound of liquid,
the sound of oleanders.
If ever
I was about to speak I
forget. I can see
that the single flower goes
aloft on the water of
the pool because it is something
that everything has addressed
to my darling, while I stand
here like some ashes
that used to be a clown,
looking out quietly
from my face to watch the failure
of these words to be those things.
Since I find you will no longer love,
from bar to bar in terror I shall move
past Forty-third and Halsted, Twenty-fourth
and Roosevelt where fire-gutted cars,
their bones the bones of coyote and hyena,
suffer the light from the wrestling arena
to fall all over them. And what they say
blends in the tarantellasmic sway
of all of us between the two of these:
harmony and divergence,
their sad story of harmony and divergence,
the story that begins
I did not know who she was
and ends
I did not know who she was
.