by Denis Johnson





Whatever the foghorns are

the voices of feels terrible

tonight, just terrible, and here

by the window that looks out

on the waters but is blind, I

have been sleeping,

but I am awake now.

In the night I watch

how the little lights

of boats come out

to us and are lost again

in the fog wallowing on the sea:

it is as if in that absence not many

but a single light gestures

and diminishes like meaning

through speech, negligently

adance to the calling

of the foghorns like the one

note they lend from voice

to voice. And so does my life tremble,

and when I turn from the window

and from the sea’s grief, the room

fills with a dark

lushness and foliage nobody

will ever be plucked from,

and the feelings I have

must never be given speech.

Darkness, my name is Denis Johnson,

and I am almost ready to

confess it is not some awful

misunderstanding that has carried

me here, my arms full of the ghosts

of flowers, to kneel at your feet;

almost ready to see

how at each turning I chose

this way, this place and this verging

of ocean on earth with the horns claiming

I can keep on if only I step

where I cannot breathe. My coat

is leprosy and my dagger

is a lie; must I

shed them? Do I have

to end my life in order

to begin? Music, you are light.

Agony, you are only what tips

me from moment to moment, light

to light and word to word,

and I am here at the waters

because in this space between spaces

where nothing speaks,

I am what it says.