Looking Out The Window Poem

Looking Out the Window Poem

by Denis Johnson

The sounds of traffic
die over the back lawn
to occur again in the low
distance.


The voices, risen, of
the neighborhood cannot
maintain that pitch
and fail briefly, start
up again.


Similarly my breathing rises
and falls while I look out
the window of apartment
number three in this slum,
hoping for rage, or sorrow.


They don’t come to me
anymore. How can I lament
anything? It is all
so proper, so much
as it should be, now


the nearing cumulus
clouds, ominous,
shift, they are like the
curtains, billowy,
veering at the apex
of their intrusion on the room.
If I am alive now,
it is only


to be in all this
making all possible.
I am glad to be
finally a part
of such machinery. I was
after all not so fond
of living, and there comes
into me, when I see
how little I liked
being a man, a great joy.


Look out our astounding
clear windows before evening.
It is almost as if
the world were blue
with some lubricant,
it shines so.


Denis Johnson, “Looking Out the Window Poem” from The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New. Copyright © 1995
Posted over on Poetry Foundation