Denis Mair

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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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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Up on the mountain where people keep horses
A thoroughbred took me on a morning walk.
And whenever her head reared in laughter
I wanted to gallop with her through space.
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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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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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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.
It also makes me think about mental space where thoughts and feelings, by grace or luck, may coalesce into a marvelous formation. Such a formation changes shape, like a cloud in the mind's sky, and eventually scatters. From the hindbrain through all the the concourses of the midbrain, where activities of the sensory and motor cortexes are entrained with memory and emotions---then up through the medial forebrain bundle, and finally up to the cerebral cortex. At each stage a tug of anticipation encourages the cloud-shape to evolve and extend. It is cloud-like, but because it is shaped and drawn by desire, it can be a fiery cloud. It is drawn up a stairway of reward centers until it arrives at a place of abstract contemplation. It is lucky if it can arrive there whole, and even if it does, it cannot float there very long. It arrives only to dissolve, but its flinders will remain awhile, glowing with the remnant energy of wishes that shaped that cloud.
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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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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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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 words 
WHATEVER 
STRONG
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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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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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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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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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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?
...