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

ONE
The Incognito Lounge
    The manager lady of this
    apartment dwelling has a face
    like a baseball with glasses and pathetically
    repeats herself. The man next door
    has a dog with a face that talks
    of stupidity to the night, the swimming pool
    has an empty, empty face.
    My neighbor has his underwear on
    tonight, standing among the parking spaces
    advising his friend never to show
    his face around here again.
    I go everywhere with my eyes closed and two
    eyeballs painted on my face. There is a woman
    across the court with no face at all.
    Â 
    They’re perfectly visible this evening,
    about as unobtrusive as a storm of meteors,
    these questions of happiness
    plaguing the world.
    My neighbor has sent his child to Utah
    to be raised by the relatives of friends.
    He’s out on the generous lawn
    again, looking like he’s made
    out of phosphorus.
    Â 
    The manager lady has just returned
    from the nearby graveyard, the last
    ceremony for a crushed paramedic.
    All day, news helicopters cruised aloft
    going whatwhatwhatwhatwhat.
    She pours me some boiled
    coffee that tastes like noise,
    warning me, once and for all,
    to pack up my troubles in an old kit bag
    and weep until the stones float away.
    How will I ever be able to turn
    from the window and feel love for her?—
    to see her and stop seeing
    this neighborhood, the towns of earth,
    these tables at which the saints
    sit down to the meal of temptations?
    Â 
    And so on—nap, soup, window,
    say a few words into the telephone,
    smaller and smaller words.
    Some TV or maybe, I don’t know, a brisk
    rubber with cards nobody knows
    how many there are of.
    Couple of miserable gerbils
    in a tiny white cage, hysterical
    friends rodomontading about goals
    as if having them liquefied death.
    Maybe invite the lady with no face
    over here to explain all these elections:
    life. Liberty. Pursuit.
    Â 
    Maybe invite the lady with no face
    over here to read my palm,
    sit out on the porch here in Arizona
    while she touches me.
    Last night, some kind
    of alarm went off up the street
    that nobody responded to.
    Small darling, it rang for you.
    Everything suffers invisibly,
    nothing is possible, in your face.
    Â 
    The center of the world is closed.
    The Beehive, the 8-Ball, the Yo-Yo,
    the Granite and the Lightning and the Melody.
    Only the Incognito Lounge is open.
    My neighbor arrives.
    They have the television on.
    It’s a show about
    my neighbor in a loneliness, a light,
    walking the hour when every bed is a mouth.
    Alleys of dark trash, exhaustion
    shaped into residences—and what are the dogs
    so sure of that they shout like citizens
    driven from their minds in a stadium?
    In his fist he holds a note
    in his own handwriting,
    the same message everyone carries
    from place to place in the secret night,
    the one that nobody asks you for
    when you finally arrive, and the faces
    turn to you playing the national anthem
    and go blank, that’s
    what the show is about, that message.
    Â 
    I was raised up from tiny
    childhood in those purple hills,
    right slam on the brink of language,
    and I claim it’s just as if
    you can’t do anything to this moment,
    that’s how inextinguishable
    it all is. Sunset,
    Arizona, everybody waiting
    to get arrested, all very
    much an honor, I assure you.
    Maybe invite the lady with no face
    to plead my cause, to get
    me off the hook or name
    me one good reason.
    The air is full of megawatts
    and the megawatts are full of silence.
    She reaches to the radio like St. Theresa.
    Â 
    Here at the center of the world
    each wonderful store cherishes
    in its mind undeflowerable
    mannequins in a pale, electric light.
    The parking lot is full,
    everyone having the same dream
    of shopping and shopping
    through an afternoon
    that changes like a face.
    But these shoppers of America—
    carrying their hearts toward the bluffs
    of the counters like thoughtless purchases,
    walking home under the sea,
    standing in a dark house at