Scott Silsbe

“From a Berkeley Notebook'
~Denis Johnson

One changes so much
from moment to moment
that when one hugs
oneself against the chill
air at the inception
of spring, at night,
knees drawn to chin,
he finds himself in the arms
of a total stranger,
the arms of one he might move
away from on the dark playground.

Also, it breaks the heart
that the sign revolving like
a flame above the gas
station remembers the price
of gas, but forgets entirely
this face it has been
looking at all day.
And so the heart is exhausted
that even the face

of the dismal facts we wait
for the loves of the past
to come walking from the fire,
the tree, the stone, tangible
and unchanged and repentant
but what can you do.
Half the time I think
about my wife and child,
the other half I think how
to become a citizen

with an apartment, and sex
too is quite on my mind,
though it seems the women
have no time for you here,
for which in my larger, more
mature moments I can’t blame them.
These are the absolute

Pastures I am led to:
I am in Berkeley, California,
trapped inside my body,
I am the secret my body
is going to keep forever,
as if its secret were
merely silence. It lies
between two mistakes
of the earth,

the San Andreas
and Hayward faults,
and at night from
the hill above the stadium
where I sleep,
I can see the yellow
aurora of Telegraph
Avenue uplifted

by the holocaust.
My sleeping
bag has little
cowboys lassoing bulls
embroidered all over
its pastel inner
lining, the pines are tall
and straight, converging
in a sort of roof

above me, it’s nice,
oh loves, oh loves, why
aren’t you here? Morgan,
my pyjamas are so
lonesome without
the orangutans—I write
and write, and transcend
nothing, escape
nothing, nothing
is truly born from me,
yet magically it’s better
than nothing—I know

you must be quite
changed by now, but you
are just the same, too,
like those stars that keep
shining for a long time after
they go out—but it’s just a light
they touch us with this
evening amid the fine
rain like mist, among the pines.”
― Denis Johnson, The Incognito Lounge: And Other Poems