The Thread Through My Days Poem by Denis Mair

Helplessly soaking in the drizzle of print that comes down on this city every day, young writers hopelessly putting out free rags covering the pop scene.

Helplessly letting eyes linger over ads in the Sunday paper, feeling the vast societal ache of over-extended retail octopus. Maybe I should go to Penny's at the mall and buy eight pairs of socks.

Helpless reading the daily obscenity about Syria.

It's hard to finish even one long article about health care - all that drowning talk of medical cost control—when so many of us want to wall ourselves against the sickness and pay protection money to builders of sickroom walls.

Helpless not to buy coffee and throw the paper cup away, everytime throwing away paper thinking of trees; every time smoking cigarette thinking how a tobacco crop for 200,000,000 Chinese smokers burdens their soil. But I keep smoking and drinking from paper cups all the same, like an occasion for minor daily prayer-— an observance of the fix we're all in together.

My head of hair- -its last chance to be long, but now it is a pelt like my tangle of half-formed thoughts that hang down matted with bird shit and trailing pretty ribbons and muskrat traps.

Helpless the visions of Taoist philosophers in my head turning to soup, all that Oriental stuff I studied not fitting anywhere, floating away like a cloud, but still I think when a vision gets bent you fall in love with it all over again.

Can't help washing my mouth out when I smoke alone, that old pipe someone gave me makes me worry about disease. I feel linked with everyone in the community of our germs.

Can't even pull out the loose change I have to help someone homeless, because he always is an emblem of my own homelessness.

Tunes once ran through my head like vines up a trellis, or snowflakes falling on a winter morning. The old tunes no longer set my thoughts dancing, but I still don't go seeking new songs.

Can't get over these scars with my wife. Two tender savages held each other in the night, but later their unborn child died in an onrush of cruel forces, like Eugene Delacroix's painting "Death of an Iroquois Child."

Can't stop polishing these word-jewels for poems, although what really needs singing are straight-out litanies of sorrow. I'm really far behind, but I find I've got to get started.

I leaf through memory pictures for something rare and fine in my past. But if I want to know how real that was, I should just look at this halcyon time called now. The best memory pictures are bubbles I never got to enter. I am forced to identify with air, with everything that glints and glances, because how else can I crawl inside of what is rightly mine?

Can't help worrying about the whole earth, this blue marble in space. The abstraction of the whole can seem strangely small, a picture I see on a cereal box, a perturbation I face amid complacencies at the breakfast table. In my oyster shell of present worries, I welcome this impurity- -this specklike picture of the whole. I hope it grows into some kind of pearl!

I love my helplessness because it keeps me in touch with the unraveling world; it's like I got to lie down after all in the heart of the woods, to be one with that vegetative mystery, just as I dreamed when I was a child. Now I can't dream it, but I do it- -moldering with the rest and joining my fleeting states with its slow crumbling, and its raising of light-gatherers to light, even though it is a forest of people this time.