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

jugs, sweetly touching the dice and bad checks,
    And to see in everything a making
    Just like his, an unhinged
    Deity in an empty garage
    Dying alone in some small consolation.
    Photograph me photograph me photo
    Graph me in my suit of loneliness,
    My tie which I have been
    Saving for this occasion,
    My shoes of dust, my skin of pollen,
    Addressing the empty chair; behind me
    The Throne of the Third Heaven
    Of the Nations Millennium General Assembly.
    i AM ALPHA AND OMEGA THE BEGiNNiNG
    AND THE END,
    The trash of government buildings,
    Faded red cloth,
    Jelly glasses and lightbulbs,
    Metal (cut from coffee cans),
    Upholstery tacks, small nails
    And simple sewing pins,
    Lightbulbs, cardboard,
    Kraft paper, desk blotters,
    Gold and aluminum foils,
    Neighborhood bums the foil
    On their wine bottles,
    The Revelation .
    And I command you not to fear.

Our Sadness
    There’s a sadness about looking back when you get to the end:
    a sadness that waits at the end of the street,
    a cigaret that glows with the glow of sadness
    and a cop in a yellow raincoat who says It’s late,
    it’s late, it’s sadness.
    And it’s a sadness what they’ve done to the women I loved:
    they turned Julie into her own mother, and Ruthe—
    and Ruthe I understand has been turned
    into a sadness…
    And when it comes time
    for all of humanity to witness what it’s done
    and every television is trained on the first people to see God and
    they say
    Houston,
    we have ignition,
    they won’t have ignition.
    They’ll have a music of wet streets
    and lonely bars where piano notes
    follow themselves into a forest of pity and are lost.
    They’ll have sadness.
    They’ll have
    sadness, sadness, sadness.

Feet
    Obedient to the laws of meat we walk
    our feet wounded by joy
    toward our humiliating rendezvous with mirrors
    and toward the mysterious treasures tossed at our feet
    as when I crossed the yard at Florence Prison
    and heard someone calling
    Poet
    Poet
    My name is James man
    Life sentence!

Iowa City
    The stifled musk of wood beneath linoleum
    in the tall listening stairwells of certain
    buildings stays, and the timbre the walls gave to your weeping
    and to our snide talk and marijuana coughing,
    that also stays, and some of the anger, and some of the stopped
    feeling, the stranded, geologic
    grieving of seedlings on a wind—and such we were—
    they remain. But where do they remain?—the place
    has gone, the receptacle
    of these essences is mysterious.
    I’ve returned to that same town, and nothing—
    no raking, no ghostly notes, only
    shopping malls standing where I beat you up
    and spring’s uncertain touch and stuck breath
    and women who smell like flowers or fruit or candy
    moved by delicate desires along the aisles.
    As we did, the same trains drag through town,
    summoned up out of the prairie and disappearing
    toward places waiting for their conjuring,
    mountains and glens and the snow coming down like dreams
    in a silence and in a tiny souvenir.

Crow
    Crow shines on a dead branch that may have
    lived then and
    under which we may have passed.
    Our preacher was a demon and the joker
    sprinkled down over our wedding a glitter
    of rain, perhaps this same cold tiny rain
    in the gusts of which the evergreens cast down
    amid memory a cherishing.
    Oh yes, nobody came to that sad show but the day
    and the night, and your train was a train of years.
    Since that time I have
    by my own count three lives led,
    one in magic, one in power, one in peace,
    and still
    the little wound goes like a well
    down into the rotten dark and who
    should breathe near there sees dreams
    and pales and sickens in a music.
    And the crow is not God, and the wind
    is not God and nothing is God
    that would not break us
    for transgressions we made in ignorance.

California
    Drove south two days ago
    into the mongrel jaywalker onrush
    of Los Angeles.
    On the way,
    stacks of irrigation pipe,
    the laughter of
    disc