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

sorrows
    drifting like perfume,
    and telephones ringing in the darkness
    and milk
    tears shining on rouged cheeks.
    While nearby
    sighs the sea like God, the sea of breath, the resolute
    gull ocean trembling its boats.

The Other Age
    A petal dripping off a dead flower, dew on the benches, a dead shoe.
    They’ve got to hate whoever did it and leave town.
    They’ve got to find the red issue of the magazine.
    They’ve got to place their hands on it so the bones shine through.
    They’ve got to admit it’s the window of Hell.
    They’ve got to put their lips down and inhale its nicotine.
    It used to be life fell apart every
    so often, every year or two, now every morning.
    Can you imagine? Once they were professors.
    They told who danced and who needed pity.
    They had skin. They didn’t have ropes
    of muscle for a face. But the dot became a tunnel,
    the tunnel a journey, the journey a reason and a life.
    We must start to forgive and not stop
    for a single minute, maybe not even to love.
    We must look down
    out of this age spent telling stories
    about each tree, each rock, each
    person who is a bird, or a fish, or walks in their fur,
    and see our brothers and sisters.
    There is no such thing as danger,
    no such thing as a false move,
    but they are afraid;
    the stores have everything
    and everything salutes
    its own reflection—shiny, shiny
    life that we call
    shelf life,
    but they are afraid;
    the eight-ball is a meatball in whiskey heaven; the motorcycles
    stand out front in the sun like spears,
    and they are afraid.

Killed in the War I Didn’t Go To
    I have seen you walking out
    of blue smoke…
    like dreamed streetlights,
    like parlor fans
    in a dream, the palm trees burn…
    and seen you favored by a wet wind
    oh where was it, in Ben Suc, a village that is no more,
    and I have seen you
    halfway there, bandaged,
    reaching a fingertip toward a cigaret,
    ambushed by the NVA
    at the battle of LZ X-ray,
    bent and weeping over your failures
    or floating like an advertisement
    in a hole of praise
    or holding your ears and turning away from the lion
    flying out of a mortar,
    and on the outskirts of town I’ve seen a man
    standing at the door of the very last house…
    He won’t get
    there in time. Time will get there in him.
    Whatever discovery he is about to make,
    something about sorrow and loneliness it would stand
    to reason, about how our necks
    burn fiercely because we keep stepping on our chains,
    he goes on
    to make it.
    He goes on
    to see it arriving on the steel point of the moment
    and see it passing with the ponderous
    drift of roulette,
    he goes on to see what
    a translucence, only a foretelling,
    is something as stationary as a house…
    I have slept, and dreamed all the things you might have done,
    I have gone out walking,
    abysmally sad and utterly alone
    because these lives aren’t like the lives in movies
    and nothing is expressed—nothing’s pressed out,
    I tell you!—of our wordless darkness in our art,
    have walked with the crickets singing
    and the faucets going on and off and the telephones ringing
    in the mysterious houses,
    and I’ve gone on
    past the tracks and the sheds and the wharf
    to the place with the waitress and the empty heads
    and a few late truckers at the counter like piled stones,
    and I’ve shouted for you and thought
    how like your name this house is
    with me outside of it and nobody talking
    and pollen all over my hands
    and fishes in my eyes and my feet moving through the world.

The Heavens
    From mind to mind
    I am acquainted with the struggles
    of these stars. The very same
    chemistry wages itself minutely
    in my person.
    It is all one intolerable war.
    I don’t care if we’re fugitives,
    we are ceaselessly exalted, rising
    like the drowned out of our shirts…

Street Scene
    Everything is water:
    the pigeon trying to work his mutilated
    wing; the crowd that draws a brand of peace
    from his circular