Denis Mair
Denis Mair Poems
Tell me, how can six feet of DNA get wound up inside a nucleus that is measured in microns?
How can so much thread get unspooled without tangling? And how does it get wound up again like a hawser?
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- -for Clara
We all know it makes us tremble
We know it can make a person's voice husky
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Earthworm, Oh earthworm!
Poor earthworm crawling on the concrete
You are burned by sunrays and can't go back
You came up when dew was in the grass
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Leaves falling in a faint breeze make a slanted line;
They remind me of moments I've had to let go of.
I want to trace them back like climbing stairs
Beckoned by surprises marked in blazing color,
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A song session under a banyan tree begins the day
Girls in moth-wing saris, young men in white tunics
Disperse to cottage-style classrooms in a forest
Students follow after their teachers, learning by ear
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In that district of cow stalls, their haven is a palm-grown promenade.
They return at twilight from their routes, alone or in twos and
threes
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Come on, trust yourself, I know how to lead you on
Aren't you ready yet to check out my chops?
I'm prepared to set your riff thing in motion!
Let's go someplace where scriptwriters eat
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- written after a visit to the Panda Propagation Center in Chengdu
In Mother Nature's gallery when I walk down a corridor of colors
I am dazzled to see white and black appearing on a single creature.
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I see a pilgrimage route through the red-dust realm
a sunset over the sphere of desire turning murky;
a lake of fire choking in metabolic by-products;
the vituperative sludge of late petroleum;
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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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(for Natali Wienstein's painting on black canvas, posted August 5th)
.....................
This color is called 'hardly-dare-hope' violet,
...
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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Today I opened my mailbox and found the journal GODHULI;
It is gratifying to hold this journal in my hands.
My words made a journey and were treated as an honored guest;
They have sung their way back to me, much transformed
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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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(for James Koehnline's artwork titled 'The Fall is Near')
... ... ... ... ... ...
Watching leaves in fall, we know our time is passing...
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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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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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Denis Mair Biography
I love exploring symbols in the BOOK OF CHANGES, which I treat as a book of QUESTIONS. The symbols are like seed-crystals that stimulate me to build an interpretive, expressive edifice. I try to write about them from a poetic standpoint. You can see my essays HERE I suggest starting from the bottom of the list: www.onlineclarity.co.uk/learn/articles-by-denis-mair/ About Me: In a suburb outside of all ring roads, so far from the capital it's in another province, fortune allows him to walk in fields where houses are now planted. Swaths of gentrification happened with the help of one-time payoffs, which even now are being gambled away over mahjong tables. He only knows this from the newspaper.He holes up in Gloaming Studio, waxing commentarial over gnarly symbols, but only as a hobby. When amusing words occur to him, he misses how his daughter would have laughed, but she is hitched to a native up Alaska way. On a gradient of freshness, he remembers " clear" lungfuls of L.A. air. Blessedly his orbit takes him at times to an inn in Shangrila, once even to a Frozen Waterfall Festival. He has been allowed to spend whole days in company with the congenitally kind, and these same literati send him projects down an intermittent pipeline. His proudest prize is a goblet won on Poets and Painters Day at the local artists' village.)
The Best Poem Of Denis Mair
Original Soup Of Life
Tell me, how can six feet of DNA get wound up inside a nucleus that is measured in microns?
How can so much thread get unspooled without tangling? And how does it get wound up again like a hawser?
How does DNA in a chromosome get so packed into coils and supercoils that it becomes like a big biocrystal?
When the cell needs a certain segment of coding, how does the double helix unzip to the right place?
Before the cell divides, the DNA must be copied. How can the helix possibly unwind at 100 rpm during the duplication?
When the cell is ready to divide, what are those filaments that pull the chromosomes toward the middle and line them up in pairs?
How can the paired chromosomes engage in spontaneous slice-and-exchange between corresponding segments? This shuffles the deck and breaks up gene clusters that might behave toxicly toward their analogues.
Don't believe the common saying that "DNA is an intelligent molecule, " or that it has higher information density than any other matter.
DNA is a totally passive medium for code; it is just a layabout stretched out in the nucleus of a cell!
But there is a matrix that sustains all cellular structures; it breaks them down as needed on the way to other stages.
Behind the rigid fact there is a dance which is never confined to this moment.
The lineup of nucleotides only makes sense in a whirlpool of chain reactions. The template needs an enzyme cascade to make a protein.
There is a matrix, at once MATER and MAGISTER, capable of reading DNA, transcribing DNA, and utilizing DNA.
In a prearranged reaction sequence she releases droplets of lactic acid at just the right places,
So contractile fibers will tighten and march chromosomes into paired formation.
And this ability to pull with actin fibers is an invention which is writ large in a muscle cell.
All this is performed by protoplasm, in a state which is basically fluid,
So the fluidity of this matrix is more complex than fixed coding could ever be.
The breadth of its complexity lies in its feedback cycles interlocking in all directions out to the horizons of its possibility space;
The depth of its complexity is the irreversible direction of its energy-state conversions going down through time.
The living soup has tiers of relationality on which the segments of structural coding depend;
Only living, liquid stuff knows the nesting levels by which code can be applied to code.
Here in the world of human concerns, we also feel that purely abstract information is of little use.
A library is not intelligent; only scholars who read books are intelligent.
Scholars who read books are not intelligent; only someone who sends others spinning in circles is intelligent,
For instance, people who wield power: they don't set much store by pure information.
And what about a woman? Her way of sending a person spinning seems to come from far away,
And she herself may be mystified.
Here in the human world we have another kind of person: on one hand he likes to dig out a little pure information;
On the other hand, he likes to send people spinning in circles, but as for which of these he will choose,
His mental workings are often in a fluid state.
He's trying to get a handle on just how complex his own mind could be,
So he can't help staging collisions with other people,
Which makes it hard for a contemplative person to focus while digging out pure information.
So along comes this trouble-stirrer, and he brings a little fluidity to the social mix,
But that could be for the good, because if we can ever really focus our minds while peering through all the turmoil,
As if "viewing flowers through mist"...we can dig up even deeper information.
The problem is, where can we go to let ourselves focus our minds?
If our single corner is too small, the context for understanding life will be insufficiently complex.
I wonder if we can dig out some kind of insight from the substrate of life?
Cascading cycles pour into interlock; fragile combinations are tenacious in their nooks; homeostatic states whirl in a fluid succession.
Relational space is a ferment of currents; everything is a precursor to something else; bonding agents leaven the staff of life; Time-the-Ruminant will have plenty to chew on.
Inward-blooming flowers make the mesh ever deeper; momentary states only serve to fertilize the process;
The outer bloom is just an epiphyte, only possible because of inner congelation.
Qian the Creative can only arise from Kun the Receptive;
Growth is a symphony written out of sight, a creation of micro-ecology!
..........
Denis Mair Comments
I am humbled after reading through your poetry. Your poetic voice has a subtle soft ring to it as I read. At some parts the writing is conversational, and at others, I sense pure poetry at its best, with seamless meter, rhythm, alliteration and imagery. Metaphor and deeper meaning can easily be found by the reader, yet the writing doesn't hammer that in....which I like. The paths traveled by the speaker are much different from my own, which enables me (the reader) to go on a small adventure with each poem I read. The author's notes are of interest, but the style of writing enables the reader to also seek their own connections.
She paid me in the kind of pennies that change hands when someone says PENNY FOR YOU THOUGHTS. I pay the thoughts forward and there is a shower of pennies from Heaven.
Since my encounter with the poems of Denis Mair I have thought several times to write on his Poet Page, but felt short of words to describe such a great poet's creative treasure.The first poem I read was- Cows in Mysore and I was hooked.Even if he hails from a different country, different culture and different religion, the love and respect he bestowed on the people and places he visited are exemplary.(contd)
Denis Mair's poems are varied in topics and imbued with deep humane values.Another poem which touched me most is 'Bait of Pity'.It speaks of the poet's kind and sensitive heart towards the downtrodden people as well as small creatures of earth.(contd)
It is difficult to club scientific process into a poem which Mr.Mair is daring.
I have found your poem which you mentioned Only for One day, and I have commented on that too. I do hope you can find that response. Thank YOU
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4/20/2025 8:46:47 AM # 1.0.0
Denis Mair is Denis Mair; actually me like novice writer has no pulse of the depth knowledge to estimate him and his writings and poetic power. Just I can say that here his expressions and poems are reviving powers for all kind intensive readers. LONG LIVE DENIS MAIR LONG LIVE DENIS MAIR’s POETIC POWER