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

midnight
    before the open refrigerator, completely
    transformed in the light…
    Â 
    Every bus ride is like this one,
    in the back the same two uniformed boy scouts
    de-pantsing a little girl, up front
    the woman whose mission is to tell the driver
    over and over to shut up.
    Maybe you permit yourself to find
    it beautiful on this bus as it wafts
    like a dirigible toward suburbia
    over a continent of saloons,
    over the robot desert that now turns
    purple and comes slowly through the dust.
    This is the moment you’ll seek
    the words for over the imitation
    and actual wood of successive
    tabletops indefatigably,
    when you watched a baby child
    catch a bee against the tinted glass
    and were married to a deep
    comprehension and terror.

White, White Collars
    We work in this building and we are hideous
    in the fluorescent light, you know our clothes
    woke up this morning and swallowed us like jewels
    and ride up and down the elevators, filled with us,
    turning and returning like the spray of light that goes
    around dance-halls among the dancing fools.
    My office smells like a theory, but here one weeps
    to see the goodness of the world laid bare
    and rising with the government on its lips,
    the alphabet congealing in the air
    around our heads. But in my belly’s flames
    someone is dancing, calling me by many names
    that are secret and filled with light and rise
    and break, and I see my previous lives.

Enough
    The terminal flopped out
    around us like a dirty hankie,
    surrounded by the future population
    of death row in their disguises—high
    school truant, bewildered Korean refugee—
    we complain that Bus 18 will never arrive,
    when it arrives complain what an injury
    is this bus again today, venerable
    and destined to stall. When it stalls
    at 16th and McDowell most of us get out
    to eat ourselves alive in a 24-hour diner
    that promises not to carry us beyond
    this angry dream of grease and the cries
    of spoons, that swears our homes
    are invisible and we never lived in them,
    that a bus hasn’t passed here in years.
    Sometimes the closest I get to loving
    the others is hating all of us
    for drinking coffee in this stationary sadness
    where nobody’s dull venereal joking breaks
    into words that say it for the last time,
    as if we held in the heavens of our arms
    not cherishable things, but only the strength
    it takes to leave home and then go back again.

Night
    I am looking out over
    the bay at sundown and getting
    lushed with a fifty-nine-
    year-old heavily rouged cocktail
    lounge singer; this total stranger.
    We watch the pitiful little
    ferry boats that ply between this world
    and that other one touched
    to flame by the sunset,
    talking with unmanageable
    excitement about the weather.
    The sky and huge waters turn
    vermilion as the cheap-drink hour ends.
    We part with a grief as cutting
    as that line between water and air.
    I go downstairs and I go
    outside. It is like stepping into the wake
    of a tactless remark, the city’s stupid
    chatter hurrying to cover up
    the shocked lull. The moon’s
    mouth is moving, and I am just
    leaning forward to listen
    for the eventual terrible
    silence when he begins,
    in the tones of a saddened
    delinquent son returned
    unrecognizable, naming
    those things it now seems
    I might have done
    to have prevented his miserable
    life. I am desolate.
    What is happening to me.

Heat
    Here in the electric dusk your naked lover
    tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth.
    It’s beautiful Susan, her hair sticky with gin,
    Our Lady of Wet Glass-Rings on the Album Cover,
    streaming with hatred in the heat
    as the record falls and the snake-band chords begin
    to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones,
    and such a last light—full of spheres and zones.
    August,
    you’re just an erotic hallucination,
    just so much feverishly produced kazoo music,
    are you serious?—this large oven impersonating night,
    this exhaustion mutilated