Looking Out the Window Poem
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.
from The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New (Harper Collins, 1995)
Whenever poetry feels like it is eluding me, when it feels too big or too small, too hard to grasp or too finnicky, too long-lined or too white-spaced, too much or not enough at all — I read Denis Johnson. Perhaps you have poets like that. Denis Johnson does it for me. Linda Gregg, too. Turn me into someone else. Beam me up. Unfuck the world for me, or fuck it all the way through. It’s a Monday night, I’m by the open window, and there is a world here, spinning.
I’ve been meaning to write about Denis Johnson for awhile now, and I hope you’ll let me talk less about this poem specifically, and more about the broadness of his work, and how it is a kind of balm for the world. I think often that an orientation toward wonder is a way to feel, sometimes, less stuck in place. I’ve been thinking lately, since I read her book The Unreality of Memory, of how Elisa Gabbert wrote:
I think sometimes that sadness, pain, and even suffering are part of happiness, that sadness and happiness are somehow alike.
I love that notion, and when I read Denis Johnson’s work, I feel such a notion resonate with a great deal of truth. In his poem — a forever-favorite — “Why I Might Go to the Next Football Game,” he writes:
i thought
that i would make a fine football-playing
poet, but now i know
it is better to be an old, breathing
man wrapped in a great coat in the stands
It’s one of my favorite bits of poetry, not just because of the final image, but because of what it chooses to subvert, and what it tells us about what we know (and what we never will), what we expect from life, and what we hope for, and how what we hope for as individuals — particularly the feeling that accompanies what we hope for — might never come. Johnson’s work captures a mood, less a certainty (despite the phrase now i know). I’m young by most measures, still, but even now, I think I know, too, that it is better to be an old, breathing man wrapped in a great coat, watching the game play out in front of him, feeling somewhat there and somewhat far away.
Today’s poem has that same subversion, particularly in the lines:
there comes
into me, when I see
how little I liked
being a man, a great joy.
These are similar to Gabbert’s argument about happiness’ relationship to unhappiness, and vice versa. How can it be joyful to come to the understanding of not liking something at all? What happiness exists in that? I think, perhaps, that it is the happiness that exists in exchanging the certainty of all that comes with being a man for a kind of wonder. It is a happiness that includes the unhappiness of this great, big, weird, and terrible life. It holds all of it, rather than resists it. In that holding, I imagine, there is great joy. I’m still trying to get there.
That holding is one of the reasons I love this poem in particular. Notice how it begins so slowly, each stanza adding one more detail of the world into the focus of the poem. First the traffic, then the voices of the neighborhood, then the speaker’s own breath. You feel yourself at once beside Johnson, in his own seat by his own window. When I read this, I feel him searching, resisting the urge to force-find meaning. I feel him wanting the poem to come through the window, to stun him fully. It doesn’t come. It never does. And the poem asks: “How can I lament / anything,” and, in asking such a thing, becomes a poem itself.
The moment Johnson asks that, the poem shifts on its axis. It resists the urge to manufacture change, to unveil something, to lift meaning out of nothing. Rather, it sees the world in its place, continuing on, and turns inward. It allows itself the grace to say lines such as these:
If I am alive now,
it is onlyto be in all this
making all possible.
I am glad to be
finally a part
of such machinery.
There is a profound stillness in these lines that is the reason I turn to Johnson’s work when all else feels distant from me. They remind me of Lisel Mueller’s assertion: But the plot / calls for me to live, / be ordinary. I find such a joy in this giving-over-ness. I guess it is a kind of humility more than submission, and it is certainly not fatalism. Rather, it is re-positioning yourself toward the world with something like grace at the center of your soul. For so long this felt purposeless to me, without urgency or solution, but lately I have come to feel like Johnson — when I see how little I like being a man.
I hear this in so much of Johnson’s other work, such as in “For Jane,” when he writes:
If ever
I was about to speak I
forget.
Or in “All-Night Diners”:
I’m trying to explain how these islands of meaningless joy
or the loss of someone close to me, like you,
can make the tragedy of a whole age insignificant.
Or in “The Monk’s Insomnia”:
It was love that sent me on the journey,
love that called me home. But it’s the terror
of being just one person — one chance, one set of days —
that keeps me absolutely still tonight…
I guess what I love most about Denis Johnson’s work is that it gives me permission to hold my fear right here in my hands as I sit here in my own room looking out my own window. I don’t have to make something shiny out of it. I can, like Gabbert alludes to, hold that fear along with my unhappiness and my sorrow and my joy and my everything else. There’s a one-ness to it. I can’t tell you how much I think of that Johnson phrase: this making all possible. And how he’s glad, so glad to be a part of it.
That gladness — where do you think it comes from? It feels like it must be a kind of daily practice. Sometimes great truth feels caught up in the mundane — like Johnson’s poem today, perhaps it comes from the bearing of simple witness. I think we often think that gladness and joy need to resist fear, resist terror, resist so much else. But I think Johnson’s gladness holds the fear right there. I am trying to do that too. Something is possible because of me. And because of you, too. The wind touches my face through the open window. Outside, there is a world. It goes on and on. It moves right past and all the way through me. There is a gladness, I think, in all of it. There is, at least, space for such gladness.