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

Denis Johnson

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061869549
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

From the award-winning poet and novelist—a must-have collection of his four previous books of poetry plus a selection of new, unpublished work.

THE VEIL

ONE

The Rockefeller Collection of Primitive Art

Solter my neighbor rocks his lover through the human night,

softly and softly, so as not to tell the walls,

the walls the friends of the spinster. But I’m only a spinster,

I’m not a virgin. I have made love. I have known desire.

I followed desire through the museums.

We seemed to float along sculptures,

along the clicking ascent

of numerals in the guards’ hands. Brave works

by great masters were all around us.

And then we came out of a tunnel into one of those restaurants

where the natural light was so unnatural

as to make heavenly even our fingernails and each radish.

I saw everyone’s skull beneath the skin,

I saw sorrow painting its way out of the faces,

someone was telling a lie and I could taste it,

and I heard the criminal tear-fall,

saw the dog

who dances with his shirt rolled up to his nipples,

the spider…

Why are their mouths small tight circles,

the figures of Africa, New Guinea, New Zealand,

why are their mouths astonished kisses beneath drugged eyes,

why is the eye of the cantaloupe expressionless

but its skin rippling with terror,

and out beyond Coney Island in the breathless waste

of Atlantia, why

does the water move when it is already there?

My neighbor’s bedsprings struggle

—soon she will begin to scream—

I think of them always

traveling through space,

riding their bed so

softly it staves the world through the air

of my room—it is their right,

because we freely admit how powerful the sight is,

we say that eyes stab and glances rake,

but it is not the sight

that lets us taste the salt on someone’s shoulder in the night,

the musk of fear in the morning,

the savor of falling in the falling

elevators in the buildings of rock,

it is the dark that lets us it is the dark. If

I can imagine them then

why can’t I imagine this?

Talking Richard Wilson Blues, by Richard Clay Wilson

You might as well take a razor

to your pecker as let a woman in your heart.

First they do the wash and then they kill you.

They flash their lights and teach your wallet to puke.

They bring it to you folded—if you see her

stepping between the coin laundry and your building

over the slushy street and watch the clothing steam,

you can’t wait to open up the door when she puts

the stairs behind her and catch that warmth between you.

It changes into a baby. “Here’s to the little shitter,

the little linoleum lizard.” Once he peed on me

when I was changing him—that one got a laugh

from the characters I wasted all my chances with

at Popeye’s establishment when it was over

by the Wonderland. But it’s destroyed

now and I understand one of those shopping malls

that are like great monuments of blindness

and folly stands there. And next door,

the grimy restaurants of men with movies

where they used to wear human faces,

the sad people from space. But that was never me,

because everything in those days depended on my work.

“Listen, I’m going to work,” was all I could say,

and drunk or sober I would put on the uniform

of Texaco and wade into my life.

I felt like a man of honor and substance,

but the situation was dancing underneath me—

once I walked into the living room at my sister’s

and saw that the two of them, her and my sister,

had turned sometime behind my back not exactly

fatter, but heavy, or squalid, with cartoons

moving across the television in front of them,

surrounded by laundry, and a couple of Coca-Colas

standing up next to the iron on the board.

I stepped out into the yard of bricks

and trash and watched the light light

up the blood inside each leaf,

and I asked myself, Now what is the rpm

on this mother? Where do you turn it on?

I think you understand how I felt.

I’m not saying everything changed in the space

of one second of seeing two women, but I did

start dragging her into the clubs with me. I insisted

she be sexy. I just wanted to live.

And I did: some nights were so

sensory I felt the starlight landing on my back

and I believed I could set fire to things with my fingers—

but the strategies of others broke my promise.

At closing time once, she kept talking to a man

when I was trying to catch her attention to leave.

It was ...