Read Online The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly by Denis Johnson - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Denis Johnson
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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 laterâjust tonight, in factâ
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 Iâve 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
Itâs after one. Youâre 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: Iâm alarmed by the alarm
clockâs iridescent face, hung like a charm
from darknessâs 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 youâll 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 flameâ
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 iceâice
collecting and collecting your face.
Â
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 Companyâs 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.
Â
How did snow roofs and ice-cold aerials
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 laterâjust tonight, in factâ
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 Iâve 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
Itâs after one. Youâre 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: Iâm alarmed by the alarm
clockâs iridescent face, hung like a charm
from darknessâs 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 youâll 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 flameâ
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 iceâice
collecting and collecting your face.
Â
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 Companyâs 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.
Â
How did snow roofs and ice-cold aerials
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