The Jealousy Of The Air

( A response to the film ‘Avatar’)

"The hope in 'Avatar' is like an idealist feeding baby eagles on vegetables in the hope that when they grow up their carnivore natures will somehow be changed so the urge for meat via death will cease and the sharp eye dim from the skies." Wayne D. Knoll




At the Five Ways Lookout on Mt Dandenong,
where
the earth bowls out below like a yawn into
open air
I stopped to drink vistas in gigalitres east
to distance,
to dine on shapes of far Baw-Baw mountains
as a meal,
as if this kingly landscape was my meat
and draught
and a birthright, a rightful largesse to skull
and skull,
and then refill upon in squander
as my share.


Therein appeared a wedge-tailed eagle,
a sky pilot beyond
all navigation codes and out of any air traffic control,
like an avatar,
an apparation out of ancient myth and iconography,
a stillpoint
of wing-held forces that kept to ancient codes
in its sharpness of eye, in the edge of beak,
in the duel talons
poised above this earth - an earth taken to
this spring’s
fashions in the latest robes
of vegetation.


But like tradesmen with chisels,
three
territorial or jealous magpies
hammered
up the sky by dents, belting with wings
at the air,
and bluntly chisel-pointed their business-end
right
into the face of that visitation of eagle
aboveness,


attacking the ease of the wind-riding
larger bird
set above yawning space, as if the
restful equanimity
of that great heart-pumped-life with the elemental
forces
was too much for mere magpies, as if
the great eagle
in its uber-priority had some interest
in their lot.


The wedge-tail saw them from far off,
but waited
for them to bear up nearly that far,
then simply
slewed away down one of its vision-paths,
following
its own great-weaponed prow as its pinioning
wings
shrugged sidelong, and billowed off like
a self-strung kite.


The eagle arched out to the ridges
beyond sight,
and was no longer there, outstripping
the bothered
chisel-heads by airy miles, it soared
into absence,

away from every magpie in mere
locality
and left them to claw back to their
perching tree
and there to cast down to the shopping
bags
in their daily vegetation trudge

as if that could somehow be
enough,
as if the eagle soul was quite
immune
to all territorial grasps of earth as
any adequacy.


15 Jan 2010 © Wayne David Knoll