Why I Might Go to the Next Football Game

By Denis Johnson b. 1949 Denis Johnson

sometimes you know

things: once at a

birthday party a little

girl looked at her new party

gloves and said she

liked me, making suddenly the light much

brighter so that the very small

hairs shone above her lip. i felt

stuffed, like a swimming pool, with

words, like i knew something that was in

a great tangled knot. and when we sat

down i saw there were

tiny glistenings on her

legs, too. i knew

something for sure then. but it

was too big, or like the outside too

everywhere, or maybe

hiding inside, behind

the bicycles where i later

kissed her, not using my tongue. it was

too giant and thin to squirm

into, and be so well inside of, or

too well hidden to punch, and feel. a few

days later on the asphalt playground i

tackled her. she skinned her

elbow, and i even

punched her and felt her, felt

how soft the hairs were. 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, who

remains standing after each play, who knows

something, who rotates in his place

rasping over and over the thing

he knows: “whydidnhe pass? the other

end was wide open! the end

was wide open! the end was wide open . . . ”

Denis Johnson, “Why I Might Go to the Next Football Game” from The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New. Copyright © 1995 by Denis Johnson. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Source: The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1995)

Biography

Denis Johnson was born in Munich, Germany where his father worked for the State Department. Johnson grew up in the Philippines, Japan, and Washington D.C. and earned an MFA from the University of Iowa. An award-winning novelist, short story writer, and playwright, Johnson published his first collection of poems, The Man Among the Seals (1969), at the age of twenty. Subsequent collections include Inner Weather (1976), The . . .

Continue reading this biography