Applause Poem by Denis Mair

- for Robin at the Globe Cafe

Ah, staff of life! I am eating this bread.
I am reading and eating a slice
Baked by a baker who browses far away.
The best part is the rumination,
The best part is the cosmic ingredients.
Hands over a bread board,
Fingers rippling over accordion keys
An ocean away,
Did I hear something on the wind?
Hands get lost in quiet pools.
Forget all the hands, eat the hands.
Circulation of hands in streams and rivers,
Surf of hands clapping on a beach,
Hands handing hands to hands.

Father's knobby hands, battered by accident,
Hands cranking toolbit to cut the metal,
Hands mixing earthworm food with dirt,
Hands carrying grocery bag.
Migrant workers bending over tomatoes,
Tines combing seeds out of cotton bolls.

Inhabit the land, inhabit technoland,
Inhabit ramifications trailing behind the pen,
Hands inducted by tubes and wires, or even by filaments.
Put it in and push it forward,
Shoot a hand to grapple someplace where you aren't,
Inhabit some other kind of territory.
I'm stranded next to a junkyard heap of hands,
Terrible price to pay for abstract hands,
No chain of hands leading to great dynamo,
No hand-inferno or skyscraper of hands,
My hand-chains petered out, they wait for revival,
To leap in gelid electromedium, try for the loop of loops
When all agents fall together
Out of pattern lock.

Hands with limited uses,
Clumsy grabbers of meaning,
Meaning grabbed here and sensed somewhere else,
Or not even sensed.
Asian hands and Anglo hands stirring one pool of water
Translations of Marx increase the murk,
After a hundred years the eddies are getting baroque.

A hand asserts the wanderer's right to settle in,
Hand that left this stinging mark on my face,
Caller dialing to spread fearful rumor about someone raising funds in Chinatown.
A hand that carries promise or threat will bite deeper,
Too many threats and promises become a drab background.
A totally open promise sometimes means more.
Exhalations gather and glow at sunset.
Keep a supply of hands to caress what you come to love.