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

to resemble passion,
    the bogus moon of tenderness and magic
    you hold out to each prisoner like a cup of light?

The Boarding
    One of these days under the white
    clouds onto the white
    lines of the goddamn PED
    X-ING I shall be flattened,
    and I shall spill my bag of discount
    medicines upon the avenue,
    and an abruptly materializing bouquet
    of bums, retirees, and Mexican
    street-gangers will see all what
    kinds of diseases are enjoying me
    and what kind of underwear and my little
    old lady’s legs spidery with veins.
    So Mr. Young and Lovely Negro Bus
    Driver I care exactly this: zero,
    that you see these things
    now as I fling my shopping
    up by your seat, putting
    this left-hand foot way up
    on the step so this dress rides up,
    grabbing this metal pole like
    a beam of silver falling down
    from Heaven to my aid, thank-you,
    hollering, “Watch det my medicine
    one second for me will you dolling,
    I’m four feet and det’s a tall bus
    you got and it’s hot and I got
    every disease they are making
    these days, my God, Jesus Christ,
    I’m telling you out of my soul.”

The Song
    The small, high wailing
    that envelops us here,
    distant, indistinct,
    yet, too, immediate,
    we take to be only
    the utterances of loose fan
    belts in the refrigerating
    system, or the shocked hum
    that issues from the darkness
    of telephone receivers;
    but it speaks to us
    so deeply we think it
    may well be the beseeching
    of the stars, the shameless
    weeping of coyotes
    out on the Mohave.
    Please.
    Please, stop listening
    to this sound, which
    is actually the terrible
    keening of the ones
    whose hearts have been broken
    by lives spent in search
    of its source,
    by our lives of failure,
    spent looking everywhere
    for someone to say these words.

The White Fires of Venus
    We mourn this senseless planet of regret,
    droughts, rust, rain, cadavers
    that can’t tell us, but I promise
    you one day the white fires
    of Venus shall rage: the dead,
    feeling that power, shall be lifted, and each
    of us will have his resurrected one to tell him,
    â€œGreetings. You will recover
    or die. The simple cure
    for everything is to destroy
    all the stethoscopes that will transmit
    silence occasionally. The remedy for loneliness
    is in learning to admit
    solitude as one admits
    the bayonet: gracefully,
    now that already
    it pierces the heart.
    Living one: you move among many
    dancers and don’t know which
    you are the shadow of;
    you want to kiss your own face in the mirror
    but do not approach,
    knowing you must not touch one
    like that. Living
    one, while Venus flares
    O set the cereal afire,
    O the refrigerator harboring things
    that live on into death unchanged.”
    They know all about us on Andromeda,
    they peek at us, they see us
    in this world illumined and pasteled
    phonily like a bus station,
    they are with us when the streets fall down fraught
    with laundromats and each of us
    closes himself in his small
    San Francisco without recourse.
    They see you with your face of fingerprints
    carrying your instructions in gloved hands
    trying to touch things, and know you
    for one despairing, trying to touch the curtains,
    trying to get your reflection mired in alarm tape
    past the window of this then that dark
    closed business establishment.
    The Andromedans hear your voice like distant amusement park music
    converged on by ambulance sirens
    and they understand everything.
    They’re on your side. They forgive you.
    I want to turn for a moment to those my heart loves,
    who are as diamonds to the Andromedans,
    who shimmer for them, lovely and useless, like diamonds:
    namely, those who take their meals at soda fountains,
    their expressions lodged among the drugs
    and sunglasses, each gazing down too long
    into the coffee as though from a ruined balcony.
    O Andromedans they don’t know what to do
    with themselves and so they sit there
    until they go home where they lie down
    until they get up, and you beyond the light years