Working Outside at Night

By Denis Johnson b. 1949 Denis Johnson

The moon swells

and its yellow darkens

nearer the horizon

and soon all

the aluminum rooftops

shall appear, orange

and distinct beside

the orange sun,

while the diamond

flares in its vacuum

within. It is simple

to be with the shovel,

thoughtless, inhabited

by this divorce,

it is good

the luminous

machinery, silenced,

waits, nice

that the conveyor

belts choked with sand

convey nothing.

When I return home to

coffee at

7:45 the lithe

young girls will be going

to high school, pulling

to their mouths stark

cigarettes through

Arizona’s sunlight.

These last few months

have been awful, and when

around five the roosters

alone on neighboring

small farms begin

to scream like humans

my heart just lies down,

a stone.

Denis Johnson, “Working Outside at Night” 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 (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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