Now

Now · Denis Johnson Whatever the foghorns are the voices of feels terrible tonight, just terrible, and here by the window that looks out on the waters but is blind, I have been sleeping, but I am awake now. In the night I watch how the little lights of boats come out to us and are lost again in the fog wallowing the sea: it is as if in that absence not many but a single light gestures and diminishes like meaning through speech, negligently adance to the calling of the foghorns like the one note they lend from voice to voice. And so does my life tremble, and when I turn from the window and from the sea's grief, the room fills with a dark lushness and foliage nobody will ever be plucked from, and the feelings I have must never be given speech. Darkness, my name is Denis Johnson and I almost ready to confess it is not some awful misunderstanding that has carried me here, my arms full of the ghosts of flowers, to kneel at your feet; 42 ¦ The Missouri Review almost ready to see how at each turning I chose this way, this place and this verging of ocean on earth with the horns claiming I can keep on if I only step where I cannot breathe. My coat is leprosy and my dagger is a lie; must I shed them? Do I have to end my life in order to begin? Music, you are light. Agony, you are only what tips me from moment to moment, light to light and word to word, and I am here at the waters because in this space between spaces where nothing speaks, I am what it says. Dennis Johnson The Missouri Review · 43 ...