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

IT'S NOT LIKE THE FACE IN THE FLOWER OF THE STAR

IT’S NOT LIKE THE FACE IN THE FLOWER OF THE STAR

It’s not like the face in the flower of the star

grows more beautiful the more times it’s looked at,

it’s just that it’s humanizing

the vast, cold spaces within you

with your own awareness of it so that

when you spot Arcturus shining through the trees

as you have since childhood and call out its name

it’s you that shines brighter

a magnitude more for the moment.

Affable familiars in a big, lonely space

acknowledging each other in passing

as if, animate and inanimate, the same,

what we all hold in common

since we started kicking in the womb

is this life of perpetual exile. Shape-shifters,

driven out of the bliss of oblivion, to bury the bell

of our agony in the stillness of an alien place

and try to love everyone who’ll let us

as if they weren’t a stranger at the gate.

O the appellations the mind applies to its formlessness

in a world of forms to befriend its cosmic isolation.

That fills space up with stars and birds

suggested by its senses and then casts a spell

like a grammar of things to turn them into words

to start a conversation with chaos as if we weren’t all

talking to ourselves. We put lifemasks on everything

like an old Greek play and act out our tragedy

like a dilemma gored on the horns of the goat gods

as if they had a clear grasp of what we were talking about.

Asking a question doesn’t change

the ambiguous nature of the issue

and when no one answers isn’t proof

the silence is divine. Bright vacancy, dark abundance,

nothing includes everything in it

like a table of contents for the mind

that plays host to its own imaginary guests.

The door bell rings and the world’s

standing in the doorway bearing gifts

that have no other meaning other than

they’re addressed to you the way life

nourishes itself on its own emptiness

as if every moment were a cause of celebration

engendered by your own inspiration.

Every song in the distance is the ancestral echo

of your own voice in an abyss

you’re trying to relate to by listening

as if you were sounding the depths

of the mystery you must be to yourself

to live among your own creations as if

someone signed you too. Your name

scrawled in cadmium red blood across

a white canvas of albino eyes in the dark.

Imagination obedient to the freedom

of its own lawlessness to create as it is urged to

on a caprice, a gust of stars, the nudge of an atom,

whole new paradigms of space and time

it will answer to as if someone called its name.

If the same eye by which I see the star

is the eye by which the star sees me,

then who’s the creator, who’s the creation?

So if someone were to ask me the colour of my eyes,

I’d show them a painting I did

of blue weed towering beside a dirt road

or a moonscape I dashed off one starless night

between the clouds. Or even further afield,

if I felt they’d been siderealized sufficiently,

the blue auras of trace elements grinding galaxies

into mirrors they can see themselves in

like leggy gazelles come down to the shore

to drink from their own reflection of themselves

like telescopes alert to the eyes that lie in wait for them.

Everywhere I wander down these pathless ways

through my homelessness, I meet myself

like a mirage at the end of a cul de sac,

and I walk through it like a wall

or two galaxies passing through each other

without disturbing a star, I embody such distances,

and I encounter hypnotists from all quarters

that call themselves seekers of the truth

trying to wake up from their own magic

as if they hadn’t caught on to their own minds yet

and were still underestimating the power of their illusions.

Why wash the stars off the windows, or sweep

the scars of the autumn leaves off the stairs

expecting the enlightened arrival

of the lord and lady of the manor any day now

as if you could get a grasp on the nature

of your own emptiness like a servant

looking for a master in your own image?

Everything nasty and blind,

everything beautiful and sublime

are the facets of a clear jewel

turning in the light of the void.

All that is separated, all that is enjoined,

all that are searching and finding

and losing themselves again like solar flares

on a return journey back to the sun

or rivers flowing into themselves

as if every wave crossed the threshold of itself

into an openness exhilarated by

the expansive gesture of its presence,

are just the hidden secret of you

wanting to be known by a world

you whisper into your own ear

as if you’d never heard the sound

of your own voice before the wind

began to throw the sea into turmoil

and you were swept ashore out of

the inconceivability of your own emptiness

like a myth of awareness sadly in need of an origin.

So you end up creating a world

out of your own inner resources and calling it

mother or father in the hopes it might be able

to explain what you’re doing here by yourself.

And that’s how you get lost in the labyrinths

of your own being, that’s how your wires get crossed

in the short circuits of your lifelines

tangled up in kites like morning glory

that wouldn’t fly. You keep asking simulacrums

of your own creativity about things

that only you on your own, lonelier than God,

projected imaginatively like a lifemask

you created in your own image

onto the formlessness of an invisible space within you,

can be the answer to. The moment

you say I am to yourself and realize

that you’re not even there to recognize it

the little thumb puppet in three pounds of starmud

dematerializes like something solid

into the presence of the real. You revel like a child

in the creative liberty of not keeping your own distance

from anything in existence, knowing

in the crazy wisdom of your second innocence

the only thing that binds you to it

or separates you from it, is a sense of play.

That everytime you say I am without

including the whole universe in it as well

it becomes the wayward paradigm

of another brilliant mistake with feet of clay.

Or as Archibald Lampman said

dead of a heart attack at thirty-six,

poor shining angels whom the hoofs betray.

PATRICK WHITE