visions as these fine hairs—
blossoms, really, these little
originations of life in
the parched world, this excellent
sparse grove that is lucked on,
never sought and found, just here
above the navel, just here where
I touch for one second
and then I must recover.
Also, if my good luck is not
yet quite too far beyond
that prudently afforded
my sort, I would like
to have several more
of these buttocks, precisely
duplicated, naturally
presenting as it fades this pale
impression of my fingers
on the left one. And may I have
the bodies with them, too? This
is actually the most unnerving
and celestial of girls, it’s
not enough that she was in
the living room now as I entered,
why couldn’t she have been in
the room I just left, as well
as all the other rooms at once?
Do you see what foul lurches
underproduction leaves us in?
And so suppose this girl were
to become lost? Lost! Would you
want to witness my running
into all the rooms exclaiming
year after year Whatever
shall I do? Lately I have been
noticing how everything
loved must reach the touch
of grief to the lover—it is
an unusual prize geranium
that does not die—but perhaps
one or two more of this girl,
of course with these arresting—
oh, my, these prosecuting
and sentencing!—thin arms,
each finely braceleted or
just plain covered with twenty-
dollar bills, emeralds, alarm
devices and this bewildering
soft skin could be managed?
Vespers
The towels rot and disgust me on this damp
peninsula where they invented mist
and drug abuse and taught the light to fade,
where my top-quality and rock-bottom heart
cries because I’ll never get to kiss
your famous knees again in a room made
vague by throwing a scarf over a lamp.
Things get pretty radical in the dark:
the sailboats on the inlet sail away;
the provinces of actuality
crawl on the sea; the dusk now tenderly
ministers to the fallen parking lots—
the sunset instantaneous on the fenders,
memory and peace…the grip of chaos…
The Story
Dunking one
adjacent a disturbed
old woman in the elevated
train station donut shop,
you think: Heavenly lady,
I’m drinking coffee
and you’re dripping mucus,
is that the story?—but say nothing,
fearing either reply. Curious
days, these, spent
in fear of replies, in horror
of doorways, sleep, friendships,
and what napkins!—wordless
white interrogations wanting
the whole story, again,
from the beginning;
napkins like the vast, anemic
dawns that find you awake
by the window, trying to
remember how it goes,
failing: the disastrously loved
one’s face some Martian’s
now, the swell architecture of the old
houses similarly permutating
in memory’s half-light,
and boxes?—What
can you do save drift
motherless through these tears when
the cardboard box remembers
the legend of the distant
store in a cool dry place
where all are freed of desire
and change, the fat man
simply standing, selling
nothing, the others silent,
every edge gleaming
with the perfect, acrylic veneer
of reality? But does a box
dream, or is it you who dreams,
and is this truly a dream of reality
or only a memory of sanity?
Turn around. Look back. Now
remember: there they drank wine
with you a last time,
there they cried with you a last time,
now the shelter is only a hailstone
that fell there,
for already they’ve folded away the voices,
already they’ve put away the light,
now that this one
whom we told
nothing
goes away saying I hear your words,
I will seek these things,
I will know by these signs.
Surreptitious Kissing
I want to say that
forgiveness keeps on
dividing, that hope
gives issue to hope,
and more, but of course I
am saying what is
said when in this dark
hallway one encounters
you, and paws and
assaults you—love
affairs, fast lies—and you
say it back and we
blunder deeper, as would
any pair of loosed
marionettes, any couple
of cadavers cut lately
from the scaffold,
in the secluded hallways
of whatever is
holding us up now.
From a Berkeley Notebook
One changes so much
from moment to moment
that when one hugs
oneself against the chill
air at the inception
of spring, at night,
knees drawn to chin,
he finds himself in the arms
of a total stranger,
the arms of one he might move
away from on the dark playground.
Also, it breaks the heart
that the sign revolving like
a flame above the gas
station remembers the price
of gas, but forgets entirely
this face it has been
looking at all day.
And so the heart is exhausted
that even in the face
of the dismal facts we wait
for the loves of the past
to come walking from the fire,
the tree, the stone, tangible
and unchanged and repentant
but what can you do.
Half the time I think
about my wife and child,
the other half I think how
to become a citizen
with an apartment, and sex
too is quite on my mind,
though it seems the women
have no time for you here,
for which in my larger, more
mature moments I can’t blame them.
These are the absolute
pastures I am led to:
I am in Berkeley, California,
trapped inside my body,
I am the secret my body
is going to keep forever,
as if its secret were
merely silence. It lies
between two mistakes
of the earth,
the San Andreas
and Hayward faults,
and at night from
the hill above the stadium
where I sleep,
I can see the yellow
aurora of Telegraph
Avenue uplifted
; by the holocaust.
My sleeping
bag has little
cowboys lassoing bulls
embroidered all over
its pastel inner
lining, the pines are tall
and straight, converging
in a sort of roof
above me, it’s nice,
oh loves, oh loves, why
aren’t you here? Morgan,
the pyjamas are so
lonesome without
the orangutans—I write
and write, and transcend
nothing, escape
nothing, nothing
is truly born from me,
yet magically it’s better
than nothing—I know
you must be quite
changed by now, but you
are just the same, too,
like those stars that keep
shining for a long time after
they go out—but it’s just a light
they touch us with this
evening amid the fine
rain like mist, among the pines.
On the Olympic Peninsula
Stranger, to one like you,
here only the old
people feel like talking—
but abruptly, as if already in the midst
of talk, as if they sensed
with you a kinship in closeness
to endings—and you aren’t kind
with them. Stranger,
here the sea doesn’t obliterate,
but just lies there carved up
into bays and inlets, indolent
or waiting. In the town’s one
hip bar the lesbians lean
into sinister embraces, dancing
together and speaking just softly
enough that you can’t hear. Your girl
is gone and you are here
because you think maybe they
have taken her from you
into this establishment where the men
stink like murdered sea animals;
they have flying beards, black
mouths they spill the beer
into over their laughter
so that you think of someone urinating on coals.
Sometimes you unexpectedly taste
the inside of your own mouth, choking
as you kiss this bitter foreigner,
and you feel yourself forgetting, even as you remember,
that you’ve gone strange and everybody
else is happy and just having
good clean fun in a place where the ocean
is large and cares nothing for men,
that you are an image of blood
graven amid peace and wine,
a strange one,
claustrophobic and heart-stopped among
garden parks through which boys
jog perspiring in their red basketball
shorts and in which toddlers
in blue parkas on toy horses rock themselves,
already stupefied, toward oblivion.
A Woman
There’s nobody here
but you, sitting under
the window at the corner
table as if waiting
for somebody to speak,
over your left shoulder the moon,
behind your head a vagina,
in pencil, emblazoned
above a telephone number.
For two hours you’ve been
looking across the street,
quite hard, at the grand store,
the Shopper’s Holiday felled
across the sunset.
It grows dark in this climate
swiftly: the night
is as sudden and vacuous
as the paper sack the attendant
balloons open with a shake
of his scarred wrist,
and in the orange parking
lot’s blaze of sulphur
arc lamps, each fist
of tissue paper is distinct,
all cellophane edged
with a fiery light that seems
the white heat of permanence
and worth; of reality;
at this hour, and in this
climate where how swiftly
the dark grows, and the time comes.
Now
Whatever the foghorns are
the voices of feels terrible
tonight, just terrible, and here
by the window that looks out
on the waters but is blind, I
have been sleeping,
but I am awake now.
In the night I watch
how the little lights
of boats come out
to us and are lost again
in the fog wallowing on the sea:
it is as if in that absence not many
but a single light gestures
and diminishes like meaning
through speech, negligently
adance to the calling
of the foghorns like the one
note they lend from voice
to voice. And so does my life tremble,
and when I turn from the window
and from the sea’s grief, the room
fills with a dark
lushness and foliage nobody
will ever be plucked from,
and the feelings I have
must never be given speech.
Darkness, my name is Denis Johnson,
and I am almost ready to
confess it is not some awful
misunderstanding that has carried
me here, my arms full of the ghosts
of flowers, to kneel at your feet;
almost ready to see
how at each turning I chose
this way, this place and this verging
of ocean on earth with the horns claiming
I can keep on if only I step
where I cannot breathe. My coat
is leprosy and my dagger
is a lie; must I
shed them? Do I have
to end my life in order
to begin? Music, you are light.
Agony, you are only what tips
me from moment to moment, light
to light and word to word,
and I am here at the waters
because in this space between spaces
where nothing speaks,
I am what it says.
THREE
Ten Months After Turning Thirty
We’ve been to see a movie, a rotten one
that cost four dollars, and now we slip
in a cheap car along expensive streets
through a night broken open like a stalk
and offering up a sticky, essential darkness,
just as the terrible thing inside of me,
the thick green vein of desire or whatever it was,
is broken and I can rest.
Maybe in another place and time, people
drive slowly past the taverns
with black revolvers reaching from their windows,
but here in the part of night where every
breath is a gift tremendous as the sea,
thousands of oleanders wave
blossoms like virgins after a war.
I can hear my own scared laughter coming back
from desolate rooms where the light-bulbs
lunge above the radios all night,
and I apologize now to those
rooms for having lived in them. Things
staggered sideways a while. Suddenly
I’m stretched enough to call certain of my days
the old days, remembering how we burned
to hear of the destruction of the world,
how we hoped for it until many of us were dead,
the most were lost, and a couple lucky
enough to stand terrified outside the walls
of Jerusal
em knowing things we never learned.
In a Light of Other Lives
It’s raining, and the streetlights on the wet
street are like regurgitated lights,
but the ambulance’s ruby element
can move among our rooms without a care,
so that we who generally sleep
where it is black awaken in a red
light of other lives, saying I
can see every article,
I can see every article in its fame.
Saying How long do I stay here in the jail
of times like this, where the clear
water has the flavor of thirst
and the meat tastes like it is eating me
and the day’s bread changes into a face?
Where sometimes you see the sorrow of a whole life
open away from you white as an invitation
on the blue of night, and the moon is a monster?
All the night long I can betray myself in the honky-tonk
of terror and delight, I can throw away my faith,
go loose in the spectacular fandango
of emergencies that strum the heart
with neon, but I can’t
understand anything. It is coming:
the curtains of rain and light the arc lamps
let down on First Avenue will be parted,
and from behind them, the people we really are will step out
with abandon, as if asked to dance—
the myriad tickets will fall away from the face
and the visions of the heart be delivered up naked
and lucid as teeth, and each
of the things that catch up with this robber
will fall on God: now You must follow
the spoor of Your own blood among
edifices, among monuments, until the police
have You in their arms
and make You say Your name.
I want to be there when the little pool of light
falls on the identification,
I swear I will never tell the others if You whisper
to me what this moment is before the ambulances,