The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly Read Free Page A

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 Jerusalem knowing things we never learned.

In a Light of Other Lives
    It’s raining, and