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
&nb
sp; 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,