Minutes

Denis Johnson


MINUTES

You and I- we agitate
to say things,to dress every gash
with a street address or a relative.
We are found in the places of transport at an hour
when only the criminals are expected to depart.

We are blind and we don't know that our mouths
are moving as we place a hand to stay
the janitor's mop- I'll tell you the story
of my life, you'll make a million-
blind and we don't know that our parents are dead

as we enter the photo-booths.
In there is the quiet like the kernel of a word:
in there everything we were going to say
is taken from us and we are given
four images of ourselves. What are we going

to do with these pictures? They hold
no fascination for the abandoned,
but only for us, who have
relinquished them to the undertow
that held us, too, but let us go,

so that the hospitals opened like great vaults
for us and we stepped from bed to bed
on the faces of the diseased, the beloved,
moving like light over a necklace
of excruciations- I'll tell you

the story of my life,
you'll make a million...
this is what it means to be human,
to witness the heart of a moment like a photograph,
the present standing up through itself
relentlessly like a fountain,

the clock showering the intersection with minutes
even as it gathers them to its face
in the so often alluded
to Kingdom of Heaven-
to watch one of those minutes open

like a locker and brandish a picture
of everyone we ever loved who drowned,
while the unendurable generosity of everything
sells everything out. Would you like
to dance? Then here, dance with the terror

that now is forever,
my feet are stumps. The band is just
outbreaking now with one that goes
all the evidence / the naughty evidence / persuades
the lovers endearing by the ponds /

the truants growing older in the sleazy arcades /
there's no banishing / of anything /
only con- / quering within /
make it enough / make it enough / or eat
suffering without end


Denis Johnson

Posted over on Leonard Cohen Forum