Denis Mair Poems

Without looking at a dictionary, what do you think of when you see the word 'flinders'?

Besides those floating sparks one sees while stirring a campfire, it makes me think of the glowing remnants of a dream as it dissolves upon waking.
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To be fit for display on the Tree of Knowledge
A fruit's skin must rouse you, yet signal danger
A certain jungle fruit would never make the grade
More enticing to monkeys than to temptresses
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Sentient species are few and far between
They learn to broadcast their presence
Even while testing their planetary limits
They fuse atoms to make terrible weapons
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After making their separate roundabout journeys through the Primordium, some of the wise ones meet in the Palace of Water. This is a concourse where the ancient intelligences like to hold peripatetic gatherings as they pass through. The vaulted spaces stir with sounds of purling rapids, with the boom of surf, with sighs of rain on foliage, with declamations of streams in deep ravines. The walls cast wavering spangles across the strollers who come here to reflect on their ongoing projects.

If we picture the universe as a vast quantum matrix, then these old intelligences have been at work for a long time, serving as nodes of far-reaching connectivity...way down there in the foam of vacuity, always dreaming up properties of matter, condensing their far-flung songlines and discussing what adjustments of laws would pave the way for coherent forms...what mesh of material properties would allow such forms to embark on an evolutionary course?
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Cosmic (Wo) man will forever be a neotenous child [1]
Grains of matter coalesce in Her sprawled-out limbs
And beings appear in the developing bath of Her eyes
SHE is over-exposed in the daybreak of awareness
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A young Indonesian woman walking on the street in Hong Kong,

wearing a black tee shirt with the word 'WHATEVER'
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Please, the baby's brain is being wired
Don't flood it with images from a screen
His fears and feelings are still unformed
His sense of self has no clear boundaries
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(After an illness, this is the first semi-poetic thing I've written, so bear with me.)

Caught up in the trip and stomp and whirl of life's multi-tiered dance, we hardly get around to noticing......all of this is an inner vista of the Macranthrope's body----the HUMAN that includes all humans.
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My life lies splayed out across the years
In serpentine course through town and city
I need an old friend to prod the memory-snake
And let me feel it stretch into the past.
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It's not easy to address you. There is so much going on within you, yet you present no form. You are the ground under the feet of things. You are not just neutral, featureless groundstuff. You have tendrilled rootlets; you have a tangle of fibers like a blanket of horsehair felt. You are a tapestry of grit, humus, rhizomes, bacteria, worms, nematodes, woodlice, grubs and things we don't yet know about. Any ground from which things emerge must be fertile. Being fertile means that you have secrets of internal circulation. You have interlocking metabolic cycles; you balance thousands of enzyme reactions in homeostasis. How can I start telling about what has already been accomplished- -all the things we take as given when we make our departures? You are not some homogenous, dark, passive stuff. You differ according to the platform that has been achieved. You are a quilt made with a hundred patches of cloth, but in sleep we only feel your warmth. You differ in all your ways of mothering us. Sometimes you are the formal matrix, where we solve the new formula or postulate an elegant theorem. When we understand the new theorem, we see it was built into your matrix of rules from the start. Sometimes you enclose us in your incubation chamber, feeding our embryonic ferment with your richness, and isolating us from the storms and shocks outside. When we stay too long, this is not always good for us.
You are as busy inside as the snow on a television screen. But your snow is not seen, because all the dots follow each other within you. You have completed the community of your inner agents; you have tied the strands of flow together; you have joined the knots into a carpet for our feet.
You exist as the celtic knot of living fabric. The moment when your labyrinth came together must have been accompanied by a breakthrough of light, but we cannot see past your 'darkness'.
In one of its wonderfully elliptical insights, the Book of Changes characterizes you as something 'simple' that 'clumps together'. This simplicity means you are so well woven we come along and simply use you as a fabric. You 'clump together' because integration is what you eternally offer.
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