THE AIR IS GLUE

THE AIR IS GLUE

The air is glue. I throw the cloak of the last thunderstorm

off my shoulders. The trees drip like musical instruments.

On every street, honour guards of people waiting for a parade,

sitting in doorways like niches of old fashioned saints

trying to beat the heat of a thousand votive candles

burning like daylilies in unexpected shrines

to the rootfires of unknown gods with alcoholic names.

Sacred flames drunk as pie-bald clowns on their own libations.

Bass-mouthed yahoos shouting rebel yells

at fingerling girls giggling down the street

more about meat than love for the moment

and the secret lives of pills and mirrors

in the medicine bags of their purses they consult

like high priestesses of volcanically high oracles

under the aural afterthoughts of the asphodel lamp posts.

No one looks the same in a bank window

as they do in the windowpane of a drugstore.

But, hey, everyone’s trying to approximate

some dream or other that doesn’t give the play away

by waking the audience up to the magic coma

of the spell that’s been cast upon them. Absitomen.

May no evil come of their words or mine.

Peace comes to those for whom all things are meaningless.

No reason to take offence. You go for the music.

You go for the grave or the girl like an accompaniment

of events for five or six hours or so that fantasize

you’re not an eagle on a leash being led around

by a jackass that thinks you’re the control freak

because you want to spread your wings a lot and fly.

In a small town the red-tailed hawks soon turn into poultry,

not the other way around, modelling like weathervanes

in a pose they strike like fashionistas in an approaching storm.

The street I live on is a catwalk of cover stories

that go from wrong to wrong like the changing styles

of the way they see the world as if they were

trying to beguile it like a morphology of cosmetic mirrors

that look deeply into their eyes past the chandeliers

of frozen tears that hang like eyelashes and icicles

outside the lair of their ice-age desires and disappointments

and see the holy wars of their mirages predicated

on the heat waves of a waterless future that doesn’t

leave a dry eye in the house of life they bring down on themselves

in gales of black laughter to the insincere applause

of fairies, trolls and elves in a farce of ghoulish enchantments.

Abstracted from complicity for awhile, I welt

like the moon in the secret windows of the Masonic Lodge

(Or is it, Oddfellows?) across the street at eye-level

with my occult apartment looking down

on the burning waters of life rising into the air

like the vapour of a dream at a seance of sleeping ghosts

enamoured of each other’s apparitions as one by one

the lights of the firefly heaters of their cigarettes go out

like the half-finished s.o.s. of the shipwrecked lifeboats

in the lees of their beer bottles beached on the front steps.

PATRICK WHITE