The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly by Denis Johnson Read Free Book Online

feel them
    against my eyes.
    When I woke
    from the nightmare
    of running, I was afraid
    that sitting up in bed
    might be a dream
    and the light from the street
    a dream in blindness
    and the dark room a dream
    in an iron lung.
    After I was hurt
    the nurse took me down
    to the basement
    to see it. It looked
    like a gigantic oven,
    and they were baking
    all but the head,
    and so that he would know
    who I was, she shouted
    in his ear, Ernest, Ernest,
    here’s a little boy
    who will never walk again.

The Monk’s Insomnia
    The monastery is quiet. Seconal
    drifts down upon it from the moon.
    I can see the lights
    of the city I came from,
    can remember how a boy sets out
    like something thrown from the furnace
    of a star. In the conflagration of memory
    my people sit on green benches in the park,
    terrified, evil, broken by love—
    to sit with them inside that invisible fire
    of hours day after day while the shadow of the milk
    billboard crawled across the street
    seemed impossible, but how
    was it different from here,
    where they have one day they play over
    and over as if they think
    it is our favorite, and we stay
    for our natural lives,
    a phrase that conjures up the sun’s
    dark ash adrift after ten billion years
    of unconsolable burning? Brother Thomas’s
    schoolgirl obsession with the cheap
    doings of TV starlets breaks
    everybody’s heart, and the yellow sap
    of one particular race of cactus grows
    tragic for the fascination in which
    it imprisons Brother Toby—I can’t witness
    his slavering and relating how it can be changed
    into some unprecedented kind of plastic—
    and the monastery refuses
    to say where it is taking us. At night
    we hear the trainers from the base
    down there, and see them blotting out the stars,
    and I stand on the hill and listen, bone-white with desire.
    It was love that sent me on the journey,
    love that called me home. But it’s the terror
    of being just one person—one chance, one set of days—
    that keeps me absolutely still tonight and makes me listen
    intently to those young men above us
    flying in their airplanes in the dark.

Man Walking to Work
    The dawn is a quality laid across
    the freeway like the visible
    memory of the ocean that kept all this
    a secret for a hundred million years.
    I am not moving and I am not standing still.
    I am only something the wind strikes and clears,
    and I feel myself fade like the sky,
    the whole of Ohio a mirror gone blank.
    My jacket keeps me. My zipper
    bangs on my guitar. Lord God help me
    out by the lake after the shift at Frigidaire
    when I stop laughing and taste how wet the beer
    is in my mouth, suddenly recognizing the true
    wedding of passage and arrival I am invited to.

TWO
The Veil
    When the tide lay under the clouds
    of an afternoon and gave them back to themselves
    oilier a little and filled with anonymous boats,
    I used to sit and drink at the very edge of it,
    where light passed through the liquids in the glasses
    and threw itself on the white drapes
    of the tables, resting there like clarity
    itself, you might think,
    right where you could put a hand to it.
    As drink gave way to drink, the slow
    unfathomable voices of luncheon made
    a window of ultraviolet light in the mind,
    through which one at last saw the skeleton
    of everything, stripped of any sense or consequence,
    freed of geography and absolutely devoid
    of charm; and in this originating
    brightness you might see
    somebody putting a napkin against his lips
    or placing a blazing credit card on a plastic tray
    and you’d know. You would know goddamn it. And never be able to say.

Gray Day in Miami
    Our love has been.
    I see the rain.
    Nothing
    is abstract any more:
    I nearly expect one of these
    droplets loose tonight on the avenues of wind
    to identify itself as my life.
    Now love is not a feeling
    like wrath or sadness, but an act
    like murdering the stars.
    And now the limp suits
    drying out on the railings of hotels,
    and the