"April 20, 1969"
A look at a poem by Denis Johnson
April 20, 1969
by Denis Johnsonwhen i think that i am watching
the evening lengthen toward the end of this country,
i know there can be no sea
at the end of the pier. even
the sea has gone to hide deep
in the spaces below the sea, and the few
children who have stayed this long in the yard
are disappearing toward their dinners.
How odd it was to open Denis Johnson’s collected poems, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly, and flip a few pages to land on this poem on April 20, 2023.
It strikes me primarily as an example of looking at the world around you deeply, with a poet’s eye. The first three lines state a kind of logical syllogism, and the remainder of the poem moves forward from there. He looks at the evening differently for a moment, placing himself geographically in its midst, suddenly aware of the light as something that will “lengthen toward the end of this country.” He puts the light of evening and then himself in a different, less subjective context. The lengthening evening is not just his, not there for him to witness alone. It is moving onward across the whole of this continent, of this country.
But what follows the first clause of his observation instantly thrusts the poem into a non-rational, artistic mode of expression. Because of this way of thinking of the evening, he posits that “i know there can be no sea/at the end of the pier.” Though we are in a very rational “if/then,” logical construct, the conclusion nevertheless becomes paradoxical, surreal even. Seeing the evening in this way somehow necessitates the disappearance of the sea. And it is not a random event, for “even/the sea has gone to hide deep/in the spaces below the sea….” When looking back toward the first lines, there appears to be a kind of causality here, as if the sea is somehow mirroring the lengthening evening, which has lengthened from one locality to the whole of the country. The vanishing sea, like the evening, moves away from one specific locale, though not toward the “end of” anything, but is somehow hiding “deep inside itself.”
That first, mostly rational, scientific even, observation becomes a kind of overlay for the nearby sea, as if the poem is saying, “if the evening light is fundamentally changing, its shadows growing longer, and if this is something that is not just happening here, but is steadily progressing across the whole of this country, then perhaps the sea itself can/will move beyond its single stable place. And where can the sea move, but only to hide deep inside itself?”
After this wholly imaginative, mystifying image/expression, I love how the poem returns back to a more grounded place in the last few lines, “the few/children who have stayed this long in the yard/are disappearing toward their dinners,” even as it remembers the two earlier images/events—the lengthening sky, the somehow-hidden-within-itself sea. Without the first two sets of images, this final image/observation is ordinary, banal even, though with an odd verb phrase, “disappearing toward.” We are forced to consider it alongside the other two—the lengthening evening, the hidden sea. The children’s mundane act of returning home for dinner is set right alongside these other two more grandiose things, the one ineffable even, dreamlike. Like the sea, like the evening, the children move away, “disappear.” It could even be that this final image also drives the other two: the children “have stayed this long in the yard.” The evening that lengthens “toward the end of this country” communicates to them that it is time to return home, and the sea itself disappears.
Given that the title of this poem is a date (today’s date) at a time early in Johnson’s life (he was 20 years old in 1969), the poem suggests a personal memory, perhaps a moment of his own poetic awakening. Johnson published his first book of poetry right around this time, Man Among the Seals (I believe this poem is part of that book). But without even knowing any of this, for me the poem charts a way of seeing, a way of paying close, poetic attention to even the simplest of moments in time—an evening near the ocean in a yard that children are leaving. Using these three basic things, the poet stitches together an expression that causes him (and us) to pause and consider how these three things might intersect artistically, the central, most elusive image bookended by the other two. And that central image retains so much mystery, so much to contemplate—the whole of the sea vanished, somehow hidden inside itself. The poem is not attempting to make clear, univocal statements. It feels more to me like a Zen Kōan, the ancient Chinese stories/parables/puzzles that resist logical, coherent answers, nurturing instead “pure consciousness” and other non-cognitive connections—stories that stir up new ways of seeing and experiencing and understanding.
I’ll leave you with an example of one:
Dizang asked Xiushan, “Where do you come from?”
Xiushan said, “From the South.”
Dizang said, “How is Buddhism in the South these days?”
Xiushan said, “There is extensive discussion.”
Dizang said, “How can that compare to me here planting the fields and making rice to eat?”
Xiushan said, “What can you do about the world?”
Dizang said, “What do you call the world?”
-- Book of Serenity
“April 20, 1969” leaves me in a similar place, wondering how those children can compare to the hidden sea, to the evening light, to me on this same late April day 54 years on, the sun’s shadows lengthening into late afternoon, a passing car vanishing out of sight.
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Well done. It's wonderful when explication deepens a poem.