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

by Denis Johnson

  for the moment. But the guy with his back

  turned to you isn’t laughing. He’s got some

  losing proposition, got it as palpably as the tall

  redhead has her matchbook, or the soda jerk

  his generous monopoly on the warm

  coffee and the light,

  so that you have to come back to yourself in the dark

  street where that proposition lives, where nothing shows

  but a vague cash register in one of the windows,

  and all the way home

  flowers look out of their vases at you

  while aspirins dissolve amid the flowers.

  And beyond them, beyond the faces of their houses all

  got up for a masque,

  they’re sleeping two by two,

  igniting the rooms

  with their breaths and sighs,

  holding one another closer,

  tears on their pillows that this life

  can be shared but not this survival.

  Behind Our House

  The cedar mapped with water and hung with rain

  has whatever a cedar might want,

  a sky higher and a soil

  deeper than a cedar’s reaching,

  but wants nothing.

  My neighbor walks crippled, with half a head left,

  toward the flag and boxes and machines

  of the Post Office, having tried

  once to shoot himself, and, having lived,

  mails a letter.

  Stove

  at my back, warm me.

  Rain on the harbor, tell me.

  Dark on the day, know me.

  Dark on the day, see me.

  Dark on the day, help me.

  Traveling

  When I was waiting for a haircut at Joe’s

  the man in the chair said, “Hey, do you know

  Tony? Lives right up the hill from me?” and Joe

  said, “Sure. Sure I know Tony. How long Tony

  live up the hill from you?” The man said, “He been living

  there about fifteen years I guess it must be.” “Been living

  there about fifteen years, huh?” Joe said. “Yeah,

  right up the hill from me. And you know what? Funniest thing,

  the guy’s dif! Dif!” “Dif?” said Joe. “Yah! Dif! And I been

  saying hello to the guy every day just about fifteen years.”

  “That so,” Joe said. The man in the chair said, “Yeah!

  Funniest thing! He must have good eyesight though,

  because when I says hello, he says, ‘Hi!’”

  “What do you know,” Joe said. Outside above the harbor,

  clouds were moving freely over the sun’s face,

  and the shifting illumination in the place

  made it seem we were traveling. “Dif,

  huh?” Joe said, and the man

  said, “Yah! Dif!” “Well well,” Joe said.

  The man remarked, “He must have pretty good eyesight:

  because he talks to you when he can’t even hear you.”

  “How about that,” Joe said.

  “He can’t hear a word you’re saying,” the man said.

  “How about that,” Joe said. The man

  in the chair said, “He can’t hear a word of nothing.”

  THREE

  Red Darkness

  Text for Sam Messer’s Paintings,

  Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 2/20/82

  Endeavor is that of seeking to be understood.

  I’m not a child moving through light and shadow

  We hope never to experience—escalators of darkness, escalators of heroin

  From the screen door as my wife speaks.

  Earth begin to tremble. Jungle drums do pound.

  A man brushed you, saying Excuse me,

  Or Mother why do you open your legs to these strangers,

  Or detained you, asking if you knew the hour

  Of the love and the sea that stinks like a sewer,

  The geography and pornography of your face

  To have my own address, my own reasons, my own shame.

  And here, in the sweet red hotel room, where I witness

  As dials on a crashed instrument,

  You were coming out of the nightmare, any nightmare.

  What am I sad about when I go to make love to you,

  That you’re not my mother?

  You’re so pretty, and the slender twigs nearly

  Make numbers on your skin with their shadows.

  I’m mystified and frightened.

  It’s religious.

  If we were two strangers, two sojourners in a movie theater near a train station,

  Wouldn’t we have every right to cling to one another

  While legibility tried to break

  Out of all the things around us?

  For once it’s impossible to mistake anything

  For itself: word that looks like another world,

  World that looks like another word,

  Earth like a heart, night like a thing.

  All night the silhouettes of houses absolutely

  Hopeless in the red darkness are singing fuck you:

  And I have come into your life again wearing a fake beard

  to sing this beautiful anthem of how sorry I am.

  The moon delivering its dry ice and spiritless hygiene

  Over the world…I wish I had a way

  Of telling you my heart is broken without calling on

  Exactly those words, but when I marshal the terms

  of my situation I see only two neon skulls

  And one broken heart. When will I be returning to this place

  In triumph? Why doesn’t L——ditch her man

  And go for me forever and dance forever in the contests

  With me all across this land? God, do you love me?

  God do you love me God do you love me baby?

  And tonight my ultimatums are dark

  Where it occurs to me our absolutely hopeless

  Of the latter, and the brightness that rakes the barbed wire.

  The fire that precedes me is the fire of the wish,

  The geography and pornography of your face.

  Help me carry what can’t be understood through the streets,

  Wheel turning round and round,

  Where it occurs to me our absolutely hopeless

  Suggests the interstellar distances.

  I’m not a child moving through light and shadow,

  Long journeys into an engulfing wheat—

  But I didn’t bring you here to clock you

  And is its own address.

  There are things we don’t ever expect to have to do, gradations in the consciousness of the self

  Feelings in which all the plant life has been killed,

  Darkness in which the suffering is turning red,

  Money on which the faces are so lonely…

  I suppose another way would be

  To talk about it as if it were a fact

  With which we’re all familiar,

  I suppose it is a fact with which we’re all familiar,

  A network of feelings, darkness, and money, a web

  Of plant life and suffering and faces

  Where everything is killed and red and lonely.

  This is the chief integrating thing about it:

  We appear to be at the mercy,

  But then again it may be we have not yet come

  To the mercy, that we will never arrive at the mercy.

  So after I broke the cat’s neck with a shovel because it was incurable

  the parking lot looked like it was memorizing me.

  I thought I heard the afternoon saying just another son of a bitch,

  Just another thrillseeker another

  Hard-on another nightmare. The infinite

  Accent falling on the self seemed

  To hold out forgiv
eness in its placement of some cars

  To my left and to my right a shopping cart or something I forget

  what it was.

  The point is, the point is I might have singled out

  Anything in that landscape and said those trees are after me; but

  It is the nature of the Atlantic white cedar to invade swamps:

  It is not the nature of this cedar to judge me. On

  The other side of the damages I saw a man

  Standing where the scenes of my childhood had been torn down.

  And he was carrying the next day in his hands, and he was awake.

  The orthodoxy in complete innocence drifts

  Into being by a perfectly legitimate insistence,

  And the lonely passion and triumph of spinsters,

  The quiet radios in the red teenage heart

  That serenade the fields around the car,

  The Hojos’ desperate percolation of java

  Are part of that legitimate insistence on quality.

  But when the wounded man is able to stand up

  There’s a second when we don’t know whether the spear

  Comes from him or violates him. Somebody

  Get me a witness now cause I got the power

  To crumble the orthodoxy with my happiness,

  And I speak of things that only the brink of sleep

  Has dared to imagine and only belief has seen.

  Stake me to the cutthroat breakwater, turnkey woman honey is that

  The doorbell? Or is it just a doorbell on TV?

  I look in your eyes I get that

  Jailing feeling in the misery of your making tofu

  Instead of—but yet, the tofu has that feeling

  Of failing to curdle due to overboiling

  While we kissed and kissed amid the fumes and utensils.

  I swear to God there are words in the air

  But I can’t read them, despite

  Their shadows’ being visible on our love.

  I talk of stuff 20 streets away because the lights

  And liver suffer in a shell. I love you and

  I can’t break through, I can’t, I can’t break through

  Down there where they’re trying to destroy the building.

  Endeavor is that of seeking to be understood.

  At sunset whiten the justice.

  I am a stranger and a sojourner

  And imprisoned, the former in their white…

  I have visited the sick

  Hospitals announcing we cannot live, while the wild glances.

  More than anything, I feel I’m neither guilty nor innocent,

  The one about Father why are you talking wrong.

  I’m sorry about the story of your life,

  I am employed or unemployed, I am a turner

  Where every word of the voice of the radio

  Give me a possession of a burying place.

  This is the one where I change my fate

  That I shall not have to suffer any change.

  FOUR

  In Palo Alto

  Every day I have to learn more about shame

  from the people in old photographs

  in secondhand stores, and from the people

  in the photographic studies of damage and grief,

  where the light assails a window and the figure’s back

  is all we see—or from the very faces

  we never witness in these pictures, several of whom

  I passed today in their windows, some hesitant,

  some completely committed to worthlessness—

  or even from my own face, handed up suddenly by the car’s

  mirror or a glass door. When I was waiting

  for a bus, the man beside me

  showed me a picture of a naked youth

  with an erection, and the loneliness

  in his face as he held this photograph

  was like a light waking me from the dead.

  I was more ashamed of it than I was of my own

  a few days later—just tonight, in fact—

  when solitude visited me on a residential street

  where I stopped and waited for a woman to pass

  again across her unshaded window, so that

  I could see her naked.

  As I stood there teaching

  the night what I knew about this sort of thing,

  a figure with the light coming from in front

  while the axioms of the world one by one disowned me,

  a private and hopeless figure, probably,

  somebody simply not worth the trouble of hating,

  it occurred to me it was better to be like this

  than to be forced to look at a picture of it

  happening to someone else. I walked on.

  When I got back to the streets of noises and routines,

  the places full of cries of one kind or another,

  the motels of experience, a fool in every room,

  all the people I’ve been talking about were there.

  And we told one another we ought to be ashamed.

  Survivors

  Yes, it slips down to this time, dissolves,

  and begins as nothing else,

  a tone, a depth, a movement, a falling,

  a snow of looseness, a chime of arcs

  that begins again as nothing else

  and holds in itself some clarity of what it was

  like a sound in a word and like water on a mirror.

  It is itself. It has itself. Men go down before it

  holding in themselves some clarity of what they are

  like the yellow fires in soft yellow globes

  of matches in a fog, that go out in a time;

  and while their hearts break, while the flowers lacquered on dark

  bars before the tide of the heart bloom,

  it lays out on the endless flats

  of calcium a solitaire

  of graves with no one in them.

  After Mayakovsky

  It’s after one. You’re probably alone.

  All night the moon rings like a telephone

  in an empty booth above our separateness.

  Now is the hour one answers. I am home.

  Hello, my heart, my God, my President,

  my darling: I’m alarmed by the alarm

  clock’s iridescent face, hung like a charm

  from darkness’s fat ear. This accident

  that was my life will have its witnesses:

  now, while the world lies wholly motionless

  and sorry in a crapulence of stars,

  now is the hour one rises to address

  the ages and history and the universe:

  I swear you’ll never see my face again.

  The Risen

  How sad, how beautiful

  the sea

  of tumbling astronauts,

  their faces barred

  and planed and green amid

  the deep.

  I see them dancing in the kindness

  of a broken answer,

  by the light

  of the jukebox,

  by the light

  of our fiery homes.

  We are that sunset.

  The angels envy us.

  Hurts

  like a mother burns

  like an evil flame—

  Black

  knives,

  the angels stand up inside themselves.

  The Past

  I will always love you

  and think of you with bitterness,

  standing on the corner with your life

  passing before your eyes.

  A car pulls up to the curb in front of you.

  Inside it, the driver turns to strike

  his woman companion repeatedly,

  knocking askew her glasses.

  And while your memory

  speaks like a knife in the heart,

  young girls with gloves made from the parts


  of dead animals move

  through intersections of ice—ice

  collecting and collecting your face.

  Betimes I held her pissed-off in mine arms

  and ached, the while she paid me for her sins,

  with a sweet joy like the Netherlands and its farms

  flooded with haloes and angels in the gloaming.

  Then how did I finally reach these executives

  exiting the plushness carrying cool

  musical drinks into the crystal noon

  of the Goodyear Tire Company’s jumped-up oasis?

  The sharks and generals within my heart,

  the Naugahyde. When I close my eyes

  I see her smoking cigarets in the night

  by the window, naked and lit up by some kind of sign

  out in the street; and then she turns

  her vision on the black room where I lie abed.

  How did snow roofs and ice-cold aerials become

  this rain following the movies down a lonely fever,

  daylight-saving virulent with romance,

  phone booths with their lights on in the rain,

  neighbors talking ragtime while the stink

  of mowing carries over the lawns

  on stretchers through the rain the little griefs

  to make us cry? How do you stop

  creating the worthless past—day, hour, minute—

  the place forgetting us, the backward-looming

  mist we couldn’t see when we were in it?

  Waitress, afterimage of a flame,

  God, she thinks, why do they make you live

  in the restaurant that cannot last forever?

  There are equals-signs all over the street,

  and I feel like a scaly alien among you

  waiting to be rescued to my home. The regret

  turns all golden and I either fade

  or watch it fade but in any case fail

  to be touched by or to touch it. The rights