Denis Mair Poems

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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by Jidi Majia
Translated by Denis Mair

Poetry itself has no origin, like a spell of fog
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Who says that beauty is only in the eye of the beholder? The fact that THERE IS A BEHOLDER who possesses a SENSE OF BEAUTY is more mysterious and beautiful than any particular object could ever be!

The soul hankers for life's full adventure, and beauty holds up signposts towards aliveness and flourishing. Beauty lets us envision life's inner workings breaking thru to the surface. There is a storehouse filled with many aspects of beauty; once we've been enticed to enter by one doorway, we want to see all other aspects. Sometimes it's the vulnerability and strength of a tender young life; sometimes it is simple grace; sometimes it is dappled and layered; sometimes it is sadly transient. Each phase presents possibilities of life-force for us to resonate with.
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For a long time I've wanted to go into the gloaming
Let me go with it, right to the threshold of seeing.
I've been wondering why it has a tinge of blueness,
Is it a balm against the day's blood-soaked passions?
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(the picture is a detail from a photo posted by Abdelhaq Djellab)
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The hands lightly holding a smart-phone send a New Year blessing...
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Infatuation is like a lens
You see things spangled with dew
As if at the dawn of creation
A crack suddenly opens to reveal
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When she first began work on the big jet liners
Ocean-hopping flights made an enviable career.
Technology crafted knife-blades to cut through the sky
So a hundred-ton craft could ride on the wind.
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Out of the unbounded, and into a pair of Converse tennis shoes!
Morning meditation over, I come downstairs,
Approaching Lucky in the gray light, leash in hand.
He spins crazy circles at the end of his chain,
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Again at the hour of midnight
Like a changeling born of an angel and a demon
A long breath followed by a pant, a yowl then a sigh
Such a plaintive keening
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