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

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

  Poems Collected

  and New

  Denis Johnson

  The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly was constructed by James Hampton (1909–1964), a janitor for the General Services Administration, over a fourteen-year period from 1950 until the time of his death, after which it was discovered in a garage he rented near his apartment in Washington, D.C. Made of scavenged materials, minutely detailed and finished with glittering foil, The Throne occupies an area of some two hundred square feet and stands three yards in height at its center. It has a room to itself in the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.

  Contents

  The Man Among the Seals

  Quickly Aging Here

  Boy Aged Six Remembering

  Victory

  Spring

  Why I Might Go to the Next Football Game

  A Woman Is Walking Alone Late at Night

  The Dry Dry Land. Here

  The Glimpsed Old Woman in the Supermarket

  Poem Questioning the Existence of the Sea

  Telling the Hour

  Retirement

  The Year’s First Snow

  On a Busy Street a Man Walks Behind a Woman

  Checking the Traps

  The Man Among the Seals

  Crossing Over the Ice

  Upon Waking

  A Child Is Born in the Midwest

  To Enter Again

  Drunk in the Depot

  The Cabinet Member

  In a Rented Room

  Driving Toward Winter

  A Poem about Baseballs

  The Woman at the Slot Machine

  The Mourning in the Hallway

  Out There Where the Morning

  In Praise of Distances

  A Consequence of Gravity

  For the Death of the Old Woman

  The Man Who Was Killed

  April 20, 1969

  Inner Weather

  An Evening with the Evening

  Winter

  Prayer: That We May Be Given This Day the Usual Business

  The Two

  Looking Out the Window Poem

  There Are Trains Which Will Not Be Missed

  Commuting

  Employment in the Small Bookstore

  Working Outside at Night

  An Inner Weather

  The Supermarkets of Los Angeles

  “This Is Thursday. Your Exam Was Tuesday.”

  Falling

  Students

  What This Window Opens On

  The Incognito Lounge

  The Incognito Lounge

  White, White Collars

  Enough

  Night

  Heat

  The Boarding

  The Song

  The White Fires of Venus

  Nude

  Vespers

  The Story

  Surreptitious Kissing

  From a Berkeley Notebook

  On the Olympic Peninsula

  A Woman

  Now

  Ten Months After Turning Thirty

  In a Light of Other Lives

  For Jane

  Sway

  The Circle

  The Woman in the Moon

  The Flames

  Minutes

  The Coming of Age

  You

  Poem

  Radio

  Tomorrow

  The Confession of St. Jim-Ralph

  Passengers

  The Veil

  The Rockefeller Collection of Primitive Art

  Talking Richard Wilson Blues, by Richard Clay Wilson

  The Skewbald Horse

  The Basement

  The Monk’s Insomnia

  Man Walking to Work

  The Veil

  Gray Day in Miami

  The Other Age

  Killed in the War I Didn’t Go To

  The Heavens

  Street Scene

  The Spectacle

  Someone They Aren’t

  The Words of a Toast

  Sonnets Called “On the Sacredness”

  The Prayers of the Insane

  All-Night Diners

  Behind Our House

  Traveling

  Red Darkness

  In Palo Alto

  Survivors

  After Mayakovsky

  The Risen

  The Past

  The Honor

  Poem

  Proposal

  Movie Within a Movie

  Spaceman Tom and Commander Joe

  Willits, California

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

  New Poems

  Our Sadness

  Feet

  Iowa City

  Crow

  California

  Visits

  Drink

  A Saint

  Ulysses

  Ocean and Wilshire

  Grocery on Venice Beach

  On the Morning of a Wedding

  Blessing

  Orchard

  Where the Failed Gods Are Drinking

  About the Author

  Other Books by Denis Johnson

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  THE MAN AMONG THE SEALS

  “Did you have rapport with

  the seals?” the judge asked.

  “I guess I did have rapport

  with the seals,” Giordano said.

  Despite the rapport, Basel

  fined Giordano $50 for annoying

  the seals.

  —AP Wire Service

  Quickly Aging Here

  1

  nothing to drink in

  the refrigerator but juice from

  the pickles come back

  long dead, or thin

  catsup. i feel i am old

  now, though surely i

  am young enough? i feel that i have had

  winters, too many heaped cold

  and dry as reptiles into my slack skin.

  i am not the kind to win

  and win.

  no i am not that kind, i can hear

  my wife yelling, “goddamnit, quit

  running over,” talking to

  the stove, yelling, “i

  mean it, just stop,” and i am old and

  2

  i wonder about everything: birds

  clamber south, your car

  kaputs in a blazing, dusty

  nowhere, things happen, and constantly you

  wish for your slight home, for

  your wife’s rusted

  voice slamming around the kitchen. so few

  of us wonder why

  we crowded, as strange,

  monstrous bodies, blindly into one

  another till the bed

  choked, and our range

  of impossible maneuvers was gone,

  but isn’t it because by dissolving like so

  much dust into the sheets we are crowding

  south, into the kitchen, into

  nowhere?

  Boy Aged Six Remembering

  this has been a

  busy day. in the morning there was

  his mother, calling to him

  from the garden and he ran

  thinking that he was

  a tower into the light around her.

  he had wanted to

  bring her water, or a

  small thing. later

&
nbsp; he will perhaps harness the afternoon

  and send it ahead to pull

  us down, or up, who can

  say for later?

  now is the thing, now

  with the light around the house

  in the yard and earlier,

  before lunch, when he saw his father

  at the well sending the pail

  far down into the cooler, hidden

  water; earlier, when he saw

  his father reaching down like

  that into the water, and did not

  recognize the composition of a

  memory, or how they, these people, are

  often composed of memories.

  Victory

  the woman whose face has just finished breaking

  with a joy so infinite

  and heavy that it might be grief has won

  a car on a giveaway show, for her family,

  for an expanse of souls that washes from a million

  picture tubes onto the blank reaches

  of the air. meanwhile, the screams are packing

  the air to a hardness: in the studio

  the audience will no longer move, will be caught

  slowly, like ancient, staring mammals, figuring

  out the double-cross within the terrible progress

  of a glacier. here, i am suddenly towering

  with loneliness, repeating to this woman’s

  only face, this time, again, i have not won.

  Spring

  by now even the ground

  deep under the ground has dried.

  the grass becoming green

  does not quite remember the last year,

  or the year before, or the centuries

  that kept passing over. all of these blades thought

  that america’s grief over the ruptured

  flesh of its leaders

  was another wind going into the sky.

  a rabbit stiffens

  with hard sorrow up from the grass

  and runs. well,

  it is another spring and in the clouds

  it is the ranging spectacle of a crowd

  of congressmen accusing one another, each

  moving in his own shadow against the next.

  Why I Might Go to the Next Football Game

  sometimes you know

  things: once at a

  birthday party a little

  girl looked at her new party

  gloves and said she

  liked me, making suddenly the light much

  brighter so that the very small

  hairs shone above her lip. i felt

  stuffed, like a swimming pool, with

  words, like i knew something that was in

  a great tangled knot. and when we sat

  down i saw there were

  tiny glistenings on her

  legs, too. i knew

  something for sure then. but it

  was too big, or like the outside too

  everywhere, or maybe

  hiding inside, behind

  the bicycles where i later

  kissed her, not using my tongue. it was

  too giant and thin to squirm

  into, and be so well inside of, or

  too well hidden to punch, and feel. a few

  days later on the asphalt playground i

  tackled her. she skinned her

  elbow, and i even

  punched her and felt her, felt

  how soft the hairs were. i thought

  that i would make a fine football-playing

  poet, but now i know

  it is better to be an old, breathing

  man wrapped in a great coat in the stands, who

  remains standing after each play, who knows

  something, who rotates in his place

  rasping over and over the thing

  he knows: “whydidnhe pass? the other

  end was wide open! the end

  was wide open! the end was wide open…”

  A Woman Is Walking Alone Late at Night

  no one can know through what silence she moves. for long

  nights, through an eternity of stealth

  she has tracked her own dim form drifting there

  ahead, has seen her

  self, lost again, keep swimming through this wealth

  of solitude. it must be wrong,

  that i should watch her. i’m afraid that she

  will turn her eyes to me, show me the fast

  outdistancing of years she sees, and i

  would clutch terribly

  after my past days as if for the last

  thing i would see, as if for me

  all those long moments, each friendly second i’d known

  was lost, gone to the air, was really gone.

  The Dry Dry Land. Here

  the dry dry land. here

  and there from the

  rasp and muscle of its flatness

  a tree gushes forth. i

  have seen trees, have

  heard them at night being

  dragged into the sky.

  i know that they are very

  real. i know they know.

  lover, i am not

  a tree, you would

  never mistake me

  for one, my arid movements

  for its flowing coolness. but

  sometimes in the dark silken

  air of this room

  i feel that we are

  a liquid jumble of trees

  falling interminably away from

  the land, its dry infinitude.

  The Glimpsed Old Woman in the Supermarket

  from the sidewalk i can see her,

  as she barely stands, easily mired

  among supermarket products,

  as if rapidly and all

  too soon the swimming hole

  had turned solid. around her,

  housewives search for a detergent

  that will cleanse away the years;

  locking her vision into

  a box of tide she must see

  the finances crumbling

  in the distant bank, or the remembered

  friends, who she knew

  would be winding up here.

  i cannot touch

  you. i would like to hold you forth

  and say, here is the television

  sign-off music; this

  is the vision crept up on

  by cloudiness, first in the corners;

  here is the morning

  trickling from the house. but i can’t

  reach you: just as easily the sidewalk

  holds me, and i love you,

  i want to crook my finger beneath

  your dress, and unearth

  your trembling, delicate loins.

  Poem Questioning the Existence of the Sea

  in exactly the same

  way that the animals were launched

  onto the sand, frightened

  after so many eons by the sudden

  darkness of the sea,

  a very large number

  of children plunge daily in their last great

  evolutionary spasm from the wombs

  of pale, inarticulate women. it is wide

  and kind of empty where one stands,

  now, years after, and floats

  drastically his hips

  against the pin-ball machine. outside,

  the detective wail of his own

  impossible child is overturning the streets,

  as he maneuvers this unloveable machine, deftly

  and like a great ship,

  through the stages of his life. just

  as confused as ever, i observe

  the buildings increasing under the sky,

  knowing that soon i must

  become him, and elude

  my children and bludgeon the waves

  in skillful drunkenness. i tremble,