Looking Out the Window Poem

By Denis Johnson b. 1949 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 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 . . .

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