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

  mountains and glens and the snow coming down like dreams

  in a silence and in a tiny souvenir.

  Crow

  Crow shines on a dead branch that may have

  lived then and

  under which we may have passed.

  Our preacher was a demon and the joker

  sprinkled down over our wedding a glitter

  of rain, perhaps this same cold tiny rain

  in the gusts of which the evergreens cast down

  amid memory a cherishing.

  Oh yes, nobody came to that sad show but the day

  and the night, and your train was a train of years.

  Since that time I have

  by my own count three lives led,

  one in magic, one in power, one in peace,

  and still

  the little wound goes like a well

  down into the rotten dark and who

  should breathe near there sees dreams

  and pales and sickens in a music.

  And the crow is not God, and the wind

  is not God and nothing is God

  that would not break us

  for transgressions we made in ignorance.

  California

  Drove south two days ago

  into the mongrel jaywalker onrush

  of Los Angeles.

  On the way,

  stacks of irrigation pipe,

  the laughter of

  disc jockeys.

  Farmhands in a pickup passed,

  their glances spilling behind them as

  one looked at me

  —as if Route 5

  had expressed you from the blondeness

  of its fields,

  its vast incomprehensible agriculture

  finding itself in the numb openness

  of your face:

  tonight, beneath the moths—tears roll down the radio.

  And you get drunk, and your scars are dancing…

  Visits

  Today, Carl and I took

  another look at the orderly dead.

  On Wednesdays before the alcoholic

  rap group at the County Jail

  across Low Gap Road, we often cruise

  these old graveyard rows, reading

  the brief, inexplicable stories twisted off

  by cholera and tossed down here at our feet.

  The shortest lives have the shortest graves,

  the little brothers and sisters,

  three and five and six, dead

  in the month of May, beside the World War

  comrades who all went away at once,

  and the three superannuated wives

  of a doctor who must have known

  something, at least, because he outlived them all.

  Oh, my lovely friend,

  moss is coming

  to fill our names…

  Carl

  is getting kind of old, and sometimes

  he mumbles and forgets. Carl, don’t.

  Don’t die.

  Let’s turn our backs on the dead

  and cross the road to where the living,

  incarcerated in their orange

  jumpsuits, mark off their days.

  The inmates look like children

  in their brilliant clothes,

  peeking up out of their living graves.

  But tonight, pushing

  the heavy words like ballast out of his mouth,

  Ron told us:

  “I’ve got seven foot

  of scar. I been dead three times.”

  The men had some kind of, I don’t know, raped

  feeling to them. I got mad.

  I refused them my pity. I’ll save it

  for the people you hurt to get here, I said.

  When I got home to Anchor Bay

  I wandered idiotically

  past the house where I’m not supposed to live,

  staggered through the meadow, ignorant

  of the lovely walnut tree, ignorant of the moon,

  and went in

  to the horses and held the new colt in the pissed-on stalls.

  This creature will live. He’s nursing now. A frost

  of colostrum trembles on his lips,

  dribbling from the teats

  of Infinity, his mother, and staining the dust.

  Right now I could go to the friend

  who, a long time ago, when Michelle

  and I were two crippled babies,

  fucked her

  because he was thirsty,

  and say

  I just want you to smell the rain

  on this straw.

  Drink

  When I woke up this morning

  the lark was full of tears.

  White, bright hail was frying

  on the grass.

  Now up against the wire

  the falcon wrecks the hen

  and carries her gray heart

  over the redwoods while the new

  sun burns on the former rain.

  Crossed by her shadow, my hand

  cupped beneath the spigot,

  I am drinking last year’s snow.

  How bad it hurts

  that the mountains ascend

  to their ghost-deals white

  with the wine of next summer.

  A Saint

  I’m drinking tea, looking out over Santa Monica,

  and listening to the old songs.

  I’ve spent the day with Hollywooders,

  and they really are beautiful people,

  charming and a little afraid. “Don’t you need love?”

  the song asks now. Oh yes,

  I suppose I do need love, and I suppose

  I’m as scared and probably as charming, in some moments,

  as any person I’ve met today.

  Here I have to mention the white statue

  of Santa Monica on the shore, resolutely turned

  toward the city and all our frightened hearts,

  away from the Pacific, showing her back to blueness,

  to homeless distance, questions, formlessness,

  and toward those very same things embodied—

  even formlessness embodied—

  in the eyes and hands of the hustlers deigning to work

  their Murphies on the Martians from the Shangri-la.

  For her, if not for me, these

  are the degraded Christ. And too

  the reincarnate, self-invented, pure

  ones tanning in the timelessness, Omegas

  singing

  in the sand beside their heads.

  It is as if Saint Monica’s beautiful love

  had conjured up quite negligently this ocean

  of which she is ignorant,

  as if what she loves in us

  had been pressed from us like wine and flooded the world.

  Now the distances are filled with it, and ships

  sail on it and there are countries

  all around it, and organizations weeping…

  Ulysses

  The hull of the knife and the surf

  of our hurting

  The outrigger of the bullet and the whitecaps

  of our mistakes

  The Commander of Suicide

  and the archipelago

  of the mirror

  Ocean and Wilshire

  The jogging women

  of Santa Monica

  I like to get near them

  as they go past

  because they smell

  like heated-up perfume

  I try to get

  inside their eyes

  Santa Monica

  mother of St. Augustine

  mother of prayers

  a guy is scraping

  xmas snowflakes

  from the window with

  a putty knife

  I would have raped you

  seething like an ocean in your bed

  Santa Monica

  wh
ile you prayed

  Grocery on Venice Beach

  Thank you salesperson I see your heart

  quivering redly in its gossamer

  I with this fiery whirling atomic

  symbol where I used to have a stomach

  lighting my dead shoes

  down the aisle

  Briefly the gauzy but legible

  future veils the place and is beheld

  I can talk inside the mind

  of my great-grandchild Oh unconceived

  monster hurting your teeth on our dead Disneylands

  we were here we touched this radioactive food

  We didn’t have claws then something in our hearts sufficed

  We didn’t have X-ray eyes we knew what

  was inside of everything

  Descendants

  I have paid and I have left

  walked out of the little store onto a white beach

  the light declining and lavender

  walked past two women

  as they knelt covered with gooseflesh

  beside the Tarot dealer

  past a man pretending to be a machine in a circle

  of laughter

  alongside but not too close

  to the people who no longer

  live indoors or hide their thoughts

  past the child

  born in a towaway zone

  the mother’s eyes like

  a creek

  numbers

  and curses going by in the water

  I leave you this record

  of an invisible monstrosity and this

  report of sadness

  a semi-truck against the bruised roses

  of sunset

  emeralds in the velvet wound

  the lights

  of Malibu the cold

  small lights

  On the Morning of a Wedding

  At the barber—

  he shaves you with that razor—

  but starting with the acceptable rightness

  thru the historic sensuality,

  bestower

  of an antique masculinity:

  denting then pulling my throat’s thin

  covering with his left hand’s fingers,

  in his right

  the razor—like

  a wand he touches it

  to the air; lowers it to my throat; and then—

  If I were a murderer—

  not in the way we all are, but the other way—

  please let my barber never have killed anyone

  when he kills me.

  Blessing

  Christ by the dumpster peeling and tossing

  your lottery tickets—oh Nazarene drinking dust, oh

  Christ rising and falling, oh Jesus

  Christ giving us the finger in “Christ au tambeau,”

  bless please the people in art galleries

  lonely as a distant train. Bless now

  the cancer of the bone, the last light making

  beautiful the poisons in the sky—

  and the condemned man in his tuxedo dream,

  his dream of limousines and innocence,

  take off your clothes and come to him in dreams,

  stand on the fire escape naked and bless

  with jazz like a rivulet of codeine

  the laughter spilling from our broken necklaces.

  Orchard

  I was a child,

  the president of a world of toys.

  —awake in the dark, but not the dark

  of childhood, because the grownups’ talk

  (and the murmur of my grandmother and the senile

  voice of the porch swing’s chain, irrelevantly

  assenting to whatever they should say

  about a life that seemed—while frames of light

  wheeled along the walls as cars went by—

  a wooly cartoon maelstrom that had put them

  unharmed and tired and a little drunk

  there on the porch, as I had been put to bed)

  turned the childhood dark to grownup dark.

  I myself am the Tacomas I have known,

  streets collapsing into planes of black and silver,

  I one outcome of Portland

  and its jeunes filles

  scarred by the pretty rain,

  cars dealt out around the gas stations,

  girls kneeling in prayer by the phones,

  —but

  loveless save as now when on my knees

  and spangled by broken blossoms in the orchard

  I breathe the terrible silence of the unfutured,

  the pastless,

  burned by the silences of tears,

  the twenty-six silences of our fate,

  the twelve kinds of silence in the apple-petal,

  and burned by the Lover

  and Utterer of those silences,

  made a choir of flame and then blown away

  like a blossom. I am these petals—nothing

  more than what I see or where I am,

  nothing—a trick of twilight, wind, and flowers.

  Where the Failed Gods Are Drinking

  Virgin stranded on the tennis court

  at dawn: her little skirt as still, as white, as marble…

  In such forlornness men sink themselves,

  following its current out past their lives…

  oceanic nauseating

  depths drifting us

  down alongside the islands where love

  clasped us to itself and delivered our drowning—

  mountains and a day and a cloud

  in a barnyard: no larger than an egg, a puff of mist

  drives like musket smoke out

  of the peacock’s blue throat

  along with its effeminate scream.

  Ah! oh! ow!—

  waiting to be born

  We pass the island of the war and the hour

  we lay bleeding and one of those tropic flies

  landed and its freaked-out golden eyes

  looked at the light This man

  remembers how he set out

  to find others who were like him

  but was broken like a claw at dinner

  He comes to Santa Monica

  where people with their faces

  stuck on proudly climb

  the moment to its mountain loneliness

  the world

  a window they might shoulder past

  in expectation of some gift of the street

  He cries I’m blind again

  It’s true

  For shame is its own veil

  For shame is its own veil and veils

  the world as much as the face—

  smells and songs make sadness

  and everyone walking toward you

  holding in each mouth a word

  an answer

  How does it taste

  this secret the whole world is keeping from me

  I just a poor mortal human having stumbled onto

  the glen where the failed gods are drinking

  stand here almost remembering my birth

  and the trees too are beautiful and dead

  About the Author

  DENIS JOHNSON was born in 1949 in Munich, Germany. He has received many awards for his work, including a Lannan Fellowship in Fiction and a Whiting Writer’s Award. He lives in northern Idaho.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Also by Denis Johnson

  THE MAN AMONG THE SEALS

  INNER WEATHER

  THE INCOGNITO LOUNGE

  THE VEIL

  ANGELS

  FISKADORO

  THE STARS AT NOON

  RESUSCITATION OF A HANGED MAN

  JESUS’ SON

  Copyright

  THE THRONE OF THE THIRD HEAVEN OF THE NATIONS MILLENNIUM GENERAL ASSEMBLY. Copyright © 1969, 1976, 1982, 1987, 1995 by Denis Johnson. All rights reserved
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  EPub © Edition FEBRUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780061869549

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  Denis Johnson, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly