Some Notes on (Not) Noticing

He saw no colour but those he knew…but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them.

– Tolkien, The Two Towers

I

All we call a miracle is the interruption of some greater one;

Or, at least if no greater, then not less than any we can see

Plainly are amid the many events in Nature we say are just Nature,

As if the fact of a thing acting against its nature were any stranger

Than that nature existing, and I think the thing even being being odd;

For a forest at rest, or else whispering in the wind (a magical thing,

I think, for leaves to speak when invisibly visited by breeze), seems a feat

As great as would be any single tree in that wood greeting or singing to me,

Or for two or three to be swinging their branches in dances, with roots for feet.

II

I’ve long thought all that’s God-wrought is a miracle we wrongly call ‘the usual’

So used are we to it through Habit (and can become numb, too long a looking-at being as

A looking-past), and too many mindless perusals soon smooth all that is intricate and delicate,

Will scour away all traces the way and as well as the sway of wave and sand can any shell;

The way pitter-patter of rain, after millennia, wears away to nothing anything- one ton stones to grains;

Will at last pattern a million-and-one once-in-a-million things once called That and This into It:

All things seeming one-in-millions if we think how slim the odds of now-existing are against extinction

Or never-being at all, all who never wonder or ponder over their ever beginning living in an oblivion

A million times deeper than collapsed stars are- a billion miles or meters more remote than any meteor,

Asteroid or comet the soul to itself that never comes close to knowing the clear miracle met in any me;

This Habit that its flattens not fattens, snips and snaps each thick or thin neck and stem, halves flute,

Shoot and fuse of freshest fretted flowers, reduces to a level all that’s tall and towers- plows mountain,

Mount and mound down to heath, lea and plain (makes plain each thing, least flea to loftiest leaf),

Fastens like leach on leg or lichen on log, bleaches blotches, each life and thing into all-killing likeliness;

Can blanch and bleed with a mid- or late-winter-like-whiteness the most bountiful bough and branch,

Starch and stanch, stint and stunt all floral color to a pallor, or a least or a last tinge, hint of tint or aura;

Can thin and stem nature’s vines and veins so no stent or statin shall open them (or our eyes) wide again;

Patches (and washes) buds’ bloodred blush and flush as can bandages gush-of-veins-via-flesh’s-gash clot,

Habit as platelets that clog color’s rush, our vain glances paling all made red as by lance’s impaling or cut;

It pales palettes, makes pastel petals palest shades (as porcelain plates), blenches splotches or splashes-

Festoons, blooms, blossoms, too- thus shuts up very color and brooms away every poor slain stray one…

So now that seat we sat at (in the east of life) to see Eden from has (in its west) shown us a waste, many

Golden palaces becoming as any old places, by sin a single paradise a pair or more of Cities of the Plain

(Five there were, number too of our senses made plain-old by senescence, and so every scene in turn).

                                                                           III

For some it’s years, for others hours, but for most of us it must devour all our eyes see and feed on,

That Habit, that is, that plucks out eyes and plucks up bunches of flowers (not saving for a vase

Or arranging in a bouquet, nor for sorting in any way), bundles and heaps these of whatever shape,

Of whatever May-phase or far later date they may be, like faded weeds and sweeps the weeds

Straight away; even the patchwork-folded fields of bold green and gold we viewed as sewed

And weaved even by the Hand of God when new (to us) now we view as something only old,

All that waving wheat, grain or corn by hand of man and machine sowed and gleaned,

A once-sweet Eden scene soon seen as vast brown waste and by our brow-sweat wetted…

(Slow-witted are all who’re forced to toil to the bone, to till ‘til the tolling of death’s bell a stony soil

For the soiling or selling of their souls, such ground as grinds down to powder those who own it- seed it

And over it weep as each season’s harvesting seems the same as some Sisyphean weeding for the next).

So behold now how all forests, fields, folks, flocks and folds once wedded together we’ve gathered,

Rolling all this richness like scrolls or sod (as if to be sold in bulk) to make room for poorer thought…     

                                                                           IV

All nature- nay, say Creation– is a miracle and near relation, really more sibling than parent,

Sister than either brother or mother (God forbid we call this her our father, for it’s not apparent

Why we’d blend genders or ignore Revelation for agendas), and if we’re aware at all we’ll stand

And stare in awe of all from the least leaf to the tallest, sequoia-y tree and all that’s between,

Both what is and even isn’t but in image or in name- made of only vowel and consonant, I mean…

All this relation is not by DNA but by the Word Who made the world we made into nations,

All that Is as if out of If (this If is in all life’s middle as those wrapped in Scholastic habits had it),

All falling from the same tree as me, all animals and plants, lands and planets that were- or are-

Eternally planned: this plan is made plain as day to any man or woman who has read in Romans

Paul saying all we take in is some token of God’s providence, and who can see with any of the awe

Of (say) a St. Francis; Assisi’s Saint saw all vistas, their vastness- as it is- with stain-glass-paned glasses

(Our nature’s stain and sin not alienating any Saint who could sing of his brother- the Sun-

And his sister, too- the Moon- with a truer-than-troubadour’s tongue, his every note, tone,

Tune and song born of a love of the One and Only Truth), and was glad- nay, was grateful-

To see in each blade of grass the glade, blessed and graced to see traces of the greater in the lesser,

Hints of his Creator’s face in all that fades; in every dandelion he saw signs of a lion and a candle

Whose halo-glow shows no less than the Sun’s own that spans this mansion made Man’s made by

The same Hand and Lamb as made him who returned praise in his hymn The Canticle of the Sun.

(Yet not it but the Son was summit upon which his heart was set, round Whom his earth spun,

This home one away from that one above he above all desired- so this lowliest, loveliest of men

Who ever lived among us- but One– died daily to self to rise higher than summer’s noon sun).

                                                                           V

Stars sparkling light-years above are still near enough to touch us (all the stuff not our Soul

We’re made of is their dust), are arguably the highest part, and oldest, of what our eyes behold;

This celestial spectacle is best beheld in darkest nights, and, as essentially, with nothing less

Than the childlike delight that lights up far brighter than can any fires that cavernous canvas

Infinite miles wide… in it fine minds find lines to rightly guide (in thinking a single bright idea

The mind unites more lines of neurons than there are stars…) through bleakest, blackest nights-

Nights when stars to hard-hearted astronomers lack sparkle, are dwarf- or pulsar- or neutron-dark-

And a seeing-in-innocence things sin and ignorance dim and darken by distancing from us, and us

From them, is wisdom better than vision, is sight divinely given, God’s gift to His littlest children

(We may miss all this until the rain and sun mix, occasions when we lift our eyes and a glimpse gives us,

From the midst of mists, a reminder, in rainbow-wrapped skies, that Creation is a mystery and a gift).

                                                                           VI

These separate flecks Intellect flocks into constellations, making specks tell tall, stellar tales of bear, bull,

Scorpion or lion, pieces others into Pisces or Orion; but all told cold, black lies who said bright white stars

Are our laws or guides, holding all faults, flaws and destinies, for those balls are holes-to-be, or as ashes

For urns, future burnt-out bodies and used-up beauties; still, blessed is he who sees more glorious auras,

Truths as that all stars are Father-gathered for our delight (above all), and sees behind each slightest light

Hides something blindingly bright as they that fall with tails white and light-years long, in blackest night…

Blessed are all small enough to stand and stare in awe, calling each speck equally spectacle and miracle,

Wide-eyed, childlike, who wonder under a spell, wise enough to inquire, What’s all this? Why’s it at all?

                                                                           VII

What’s this Earth but the Universe in miniature, a planet so perfect only God could’ve planned it,

Not made in His image as man is yet manifesting His mastery, and is no random mansion or castle

Built by hands of Chance but a Designer (Who signed it) Who made it exquisitely fit for its inhabitants,

And no matter how well we grasp its mass or matter we’re blind to miss or dismiss its well-deep mystery.

He Who called it forth (His story is also history) and formed from nothing everything, ordering all works

By His Word Who is worthy of our worship and all glory for He is All-Holy- is acknowledged by all Nature

But Man’s alone (so says the Apostle’s Epistle to Romans which, while not Gospel truth, is true Scripture,

All which, say Saints Paul and Peter, is Spirit-inspired, whether the black-lettered or- still better- the red);

Only the worldly-minded man (gold-gulled and by bitter winds of true-to-selfish-flesh-yet-false-as-hell

Doctrines blown as gulls in squalls and lured from the Word of the Lord) can be so blinded by the blend

Of sin and its offspring ignorance as to think anything bland and here unbidden, or born of blind Chance

(A manmade phantom, this), rather than by the Hand of Him Who is hidden only to the hardened sinner.

                                                                           VIII

Nothing that’s noted or known, noun or not, is a non-phenomenon, all things good for made by God…

Any gnat or ant is as grand and giant as an elephant to those who know how to set claims of size aside;

A dies-in-a day fly fully as strange as the frog-from-a-fish that dines on and finds it a dish most delicious-

Is to those who know it’s more eyed than Argus and fit with a shell hard as any armor or bone for skin;

Bees that see beyond violet light see more than we- whose slighter sight can’t see to the color eight;

And what a notion that bats see by motion- whose sight is by screech and who shape a world by flight

(That lesser than the least of creatures, the fly- the flea– was even muse for a bloody-good love poem).

In every dew-wet web we detect the invisible spinner, and in many a denier of the Maker of the made

May suspect Pride’s hiding like a spider, has caught at thought, entwining minds in nets most intricate;

In some stick-slim or plump mushroom, or slimy, spongy fungus below well-spun, finer-than-thread webs

We detect both growth and death, one from the other, with evidence of an Intelligence infinitely more

Immense than some men’s that begins at sense, there ends and never comprehends the being’s essence.

                                                                           IX

Inspect it with Heaven-given spectacles and what’s some summer-summoned butterfly but an insect

With stained-glass wings swinging on the wind, its skin showing millions more inks than a chameleon’s?

Or the bee but better than any bet can be there is a Being behind it since it is and there can be,

(As Thomas Aquinas says) no infinite regress but must be some first-bringer, a fruit-seeder, an it-giver?

Both butterfly and bee are as all beings in beginning at be, before breath or beat of heart or wing,

Existing with God before they’re here born or begotten (or however brought to me); and how hard,

How earth-and-dirt-bound their hearts that can’t see the Artist in the art, the blessing in the scene

Of all this utter being of butterfly and bee, of bud and bulb, of blossom, bloom and bell, whose hearts

Are apart rather than part of what (heart tells) was from the start planned and planted for Man’s harvest

(Planned light years before star ever sparkled, before that first spark when nothing was and all was dark).

                                                                           X

It won’t do to make much ado about a puddle of mud, fuss over every bug that hugs or hovers above it,

But there’s the beauty of be, truest treasure in each creature we see in nature, in whatever was uttered

Into existence since the day God created, of all that was and is since, as Genesis says, ‘In the beginning…’

Each least leaf may leap from a scene, and equally any tree can recede from it when seen so often,

Softening into a background of gray and green, stale and pale, these leaves then like pages from a tale

Too often told to cast a spell… ages ago, as a lad, I had a book I loved looking at, no novel or volume

But a pop-up one whose pages magically (I call it) made a house, castle, mountain and a green woodland

Scene (no home for me but more some gnome I’d seek believing from between leaves he eyed me),

For forth from foam, froth, fountain or cloud (I can see it now) there would form a sort of origami

As original as Eden must’ve been before the apple was eaten; I think of it now when I think how Habit

Has clothed in fabric- rags– each page of nature’s peerless pageant I peered at- gaped at- with Wows

When that word was worth thousands- worth worlds- but now (alas) all’s as flat as any flag without flap.

                                                                        XI

That word Wow I’d all but blurt out is nowhere to be found now that all is blurred and blunted,

That sound of O– vowel short for Wow, or a sort of open mouth- I’m all out of now that I’m grown.

The boy who saw in a sapling a sequoia (tree of vowels) now looks down on trees once towering,

The age of now and here having gone to one of once and nowhere, as is goes to was, see to saw,

And each tree that stunned us once is stunted, too-often-seeing the saw that cuts trunks to stumps…

An ordinary acorn is as astounding as the oak it hosts; oak that, in turn, on its slow, skyward climb

Hoists it high till fall’s swift wind strips its stem from some stick-stiff or limber, limper limb and it falls

Down to the ground where it’s found as food or, as before, takes root to become the roof of the wood…

Beware any many-roomed, eaves-of-loveliest-leaves woods, those whose Eden’s-beauty woos us, Eve’s

Offspring, into never leaving; to be ourselves as Lotus-Eaters, or the other sort- not Lothlorien- of Elves;

To ever dwell with La Belle Beauty and label her Lady True-and-Good; to believe Keatsian spells Gospel;

To be a damned Adam who, with guard down, eats in an eastern garden- and, having eaten, losing Eden-

(Yet may regain when we, as Hopkins sings of the King, let him easter in us…be a crimson-cresseted east)

Lest we be by beauty-seduced, reduced at last to stony ruin, lusting for sluts, loving Medusas as Muses;

So love, move to music much, using sound sense, ever choosing silence over Sirens, if choose you must.

But all this is whimsy to bored or numbed intellects that see and treat each tree’s sum as just so much

Lumber-to-be, each feature shrunk to the trunk (all stumps cut to stub and nub to realize every buck),

Then taken by truck and treasured equal to the number or measure of board feet some mill will cut up…

Honestly, a lot of rot was in me once, since when a boy (in no sense all-innocence) some company sought

To buy a sum of many trees in our lot, I thought, money never growing like leaves on any of our stock-

For times were often as hard as the logs we burned in our iron stove to save (is it ironic to burn the wood

One wouldn’t sell, or is there honor in not selling out?)- my dad should make the bargain; but his pride

Was above price and instead blessed his sons with a priceless lesson, and I, for one, haven’t yet forgotten;

And as a boy I even cut down a small forest for forts that would rot before three or four years were gone

(Hoping to make amends, before men I’ve confessed my immense sins, and can end now with an Amen).

                                                                           XII

Knowing now how that once-childlike mind of mine, finding mine-deep while sky-high delight each time

A bird perched on a twig and chirped her greeting, could so soon cloud so no bright sight nor loud sound

Could arouse it as it did when I was a lad, makes me not sad now so much as nostalgic, not quite glad…

Not sad, as I hold out some small hope that parting may be a prelude to reunion, and it was, in any case,

More straying than parting on my part (no word was said nor tear shed, at any rate), no smarting for one

Too dumb to know something lovely was gone; that boy I was never said bon voyage to that joyous age,

Never wished it away as many may who want to become men in a moment or on some stated, fated day-

Say, ‘By the time I turn thirteen’- and such thoughts offer me some solace, some hope for the future…

Hope there still are remains of that age or era somewhere, not in still images slim as flimsy film, nothing

Either video- or camera-caught or whatnot, but neither do I mean in the ether or air and so can wither

(The way things decay with the weather, in wind and in rain, blazing suns and blizzards) or fade away

To no-place, so not as faces to blind eyes or arias to deaf ears, but areas, traces in a brain Mind can find.

At that happier time the delight I named mine was in me (as sight is in the Mind, not eye), not the thing

I took delight in- of or from, in a way of speaking- and only in time did I find what was of it and what me;

Surely the joy was more in me, nothing foreign, for in me was or is the feeling, and in me the memory

And a thing- as an apple, say- is the stimulus, catalyst for the catalogue, list, whatever it is leafed through

By us we call recall- memory- thought- though we ought (as it passes as sap through root, trunk, branch,

Limb, twig or stem to its fruition, barring any snap along synaptic ways)… we ought, I say, label a miracle.   

                                                                           XIII

That ones- we all are- who once saw with awe each dawn called forth from its wandering (though not

So wayward we didn’t know, down to the marrow of our bones, the glow would return on the morrow)

In some dark land by a wand or the Hand of God- such a spell were we under- can cease wondering

Is proof to me we’re world-weary, and whether dry-eyed or teary we cease to see as clearly as early on

When we (newly risen on the horizon too) saw, as clear as noon, by each beam each being’s be and am…

Year by year, tear by tear, we’re torn from what we were born into the world for, and if not tornado-

Or hurricane-whirled in Mind or brain it’s much the same, for the worst kind of blindness isn’t a maniac’s

Or romantic’s (as is the claim) but is the man’s led by the head, by the left instead of right hemisphere,

As it were (he who, in a fog of logic, divides every where into here or there, each option into either/or,

Not honoring that part rightly called heart that gives the world its worth, makes us feel right with earth);

One who makes division in vision, sees as who lacks an eye and so all’s flat (all pat to that half that’s mad

For order and pattern), one to who we say, ‘You are more autist than artist, a seer of patterns, perhaps,

But blind to the plan’, as one who’s born colorblind and so all’s white and black, and yet gray and drab

(Not a gray to vary, layer, shade, but veil, fade, drain life’s very auras and veins); or as one whose bad luck

Or sad lack is proved in every look at auras and hues he (till too used to them) used to find more alluring

And beautiful than any muse, maid or diamond- and loved- but now to all daylight’s delights is bat-blind.

                                                                      XIV

Worse for us when later on we learn the world alters or turns only by order or law, never an enchanter’s

Word and/or wand, when we’re lured, forced in fact to believe, all’s ruled by forces that act-at-a-distance

(Our prayer, for instance, traverses the air far faster than any can fathom, is in Heaven’s ear- infinitely

Far-off while intimately near- as instant as thought, but they speak of math, physics and as at random),

That there are reasons for seasons that leave us out of the equation, that leaves turn as if burning

Not first to fire our desire and wonder but because the year’s older and the sun’s grown colder,

And all that’s colored red or orange, brown, amber, umber, yellow or whatever other must just the same

As if we were never there to love- I dare say lust in our blood- what I’ve never discovered words for…

My Soul is in awe at Autumn’s auras, these leaves that turn surer than the world- that latter a fact

We all fall for, take on faith and say is true on its face, yet is not half as factual as is one actual Soul,

And I’ll grant the Earth moves as soon as who I’m talking to does it does not solely round the Sun-

Or, out of deference to truth, let us split the difference and say it does both and goes round the Sol…

How awful to hear all revolves by gravity more than moved by love, that all motives and emotions

Are under the same laws of motion as air, earth and ocean, that even the breeze blows where it must,

Not where it will, and is merely here and there an unevenness in the atmosphere, at most some atoms

Seeking equilibrium, mindless wind rather than Heaven’s breathing: but eye nor I will believe that vile lie.

                                                                           XV      

Often bright, moonlit nights reignite my senses, most those five and scenes I’ve seen so often I’ve almost

Lost sight of them, ones most lovely once but long since, not ugly, but sites of no interest or indifference;

The often of Habit has often hardened this heart to what only a certain sort of pain or hurt will soften,

The electricity of a first elation, hard to explain except to say it finds some expression in Mind and brain

And mouth agape- and, if breath isn’t taken away, in some familiar phrase as ‘Oh wow! How beautiful!’

Or ‘I see this and am speechless’, and hope the cant words you don’t have will tell very well all you can’t,

As translation strains, and language languishes, amid this strange mix and range of elation and anguish.

By being too near we’re far away, for one loses by over-closeness some of those true features safe in

Their keeping; so, hoping to regrow some garden blooms I’ve grown hardened to through noticing

Though not noting (not so far gone and senseless then as to not know I don’t notice) I change the frame

Of reference and, in lieu of seeking new scenes, I see the same I knew in new luminescence, those ones

Once known under suns at noon now in moonlight blue-hued and made new again, and the senses, too.

Equally true, things seen by one seem new seen by two, when I alone sees with you– and then, as when

A long-closed, second eye (or orb) opens to show us more dimensions in our world, we view things truly;

I muse too on that us that makes me me– do so to find who I am, if I can, as a man among my so-many.

                                                                           XVI  

Nothing of what we later name lazily under the domain of Everything, making hazy what was once airy

And smearing what was clear as glass raised against a May morning’s rays, was ordained to be ordinary;

Wasn’t, I say, made to be misnamed, or- much the same- named as a way to replace any act of seeing

(As we’re too numb to number each rose and so take on trust each bunch of ones to be some dozen,

The assumed sum round and good enough for those who see as though roughly were thoroughly).

A lot is blotted, blighted, blunted years before we’re aware how some scene shows less than what it was

When we saw- for we, in awe, watched like hawks- (will we, looking back at life, be a lot like Lot’s wife?)

Say, each apple as red as a rose or pear ripe as the time when it’s right to strike out on one’s own in life…

These apples or pears- you may say a peach or an orange, for all I care- I use here are two fruits

I grew used to seeing on their trees as I too grew; but with growing goes pruning, both of branch

And of brain, and the day came when those fruits (once round runes of a beauty beyond reason)

Were ruined in the same way we irrationally waste the tastiest, juiciest grapes for prunes and raisins,

Youthful food for the fodder, forage or rations of old age; each apple or pear was once unique to me

Who almost knew each (dare I say?) as the Lord every sparrow that ever flew like an arrow- not one lost

To the Eternal view, being watched from before it hatched until well beyond the moment it crashed…

                                                                           XVII

Each fruit I saw as the only one that hung, for none was just another among any number of the same

(I may, saying that, add each had its name), was rare as some odd unicorn without the horn or a rainbow

When it hasn’t rained, and as each one was an only there were none to spare; and so to compare

Apple to apple, pear to pear, was no different than apple to pear (being unique, there was no pair there).

Then one day- or one season- or for many even- they ceased showing and I was slow to notice; it was not

Ice or fire, neither the weather nor blight far as I know- maybe it was age (mine or theirs?), and I wonder

(Does the boy in me, I mean) whether, since these apples and pears, each and all, were specially there

For me to see and gather together, they ceased to appear when I, ceasing to care, ceased being aware.

More awake these days, as if slapped in the face- or had a gold apple dropped on my head as I napped-

After a lapse that was a sort of R.I.P. or a shorter Rip-like thing, I now think to blink is to be blind as a bat;

Thinking that, I’ve sat sad and tired and tried fathoming what happened to that fascination I had as a lad

Who saw all with awe and gratitude (gratitude back then actualized in the act rather than in any attempt

At an ‘attitude of’, as with those habits I practiced as a man acting until manifesting what he was after).

                                                                           XVIII

This evening I sit envisioning recapturing all that Life, Time, Mind and Age has made fade- not memories

Merely, or images of scenes long-erased I’ve tried to raise and revive by means of nostalgia and mirage…

I stay and await what rays of grace may enable me to recall how I saw the miracle of all before me, all be-

Fore that vast, fast-passing sun above me has sunken; I’ll linger a while longer as the last shafts are cast

From the west to catch what my eyes watch for at evenings in the east: at that shadowy hour when seer,

Seeing, and scene may from three form one, seeming to become- here, now, in me- a kind of tiny trinity.

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