Noticing

I took this quite a while back---in rain, in the Feather River Canyon---

near my son's home, one of the world's beautiful places.

Tonight, another thoughtful, and playful, poem by Mary Ruefle.
Alert: I have several more marked in her Selected Poems, to share here. Get this book!
I also have Madness, Rack and Honey; collected lectures, Wave Books, 2012, which I must read in smaller bites, because the thought is so rich and compressed. Both of these books, as well as the small one of her erasure poems, A Little White Shadow, have the most beautiful, soft, simple, off-white paper covers. Lovely to hold in the hand! The same publisher has issued Lorine Niedecker's Lake Superior in a similar cover. Love it!

After a Rain

They noticed, you see, that I was a noticing
kind of person, and so they left the dictionary
out in the rain and I noticed it,
I noticed it was open to the rain page,
much harm had come to it, it had aged to the age
of ninety-five paper years and I noticed rainbow
follows rain in the book, just as it does on
earth, and I noticed it was silly of me to
notice so much but I noticed there is no stationary
in heaven, I noticed an infant will grip your hand like
there is no tomorrow, while the very aged
will give you a weightless hand for the same reason,
I noticed in a loving frenzy that some are hemlocked
and others are not (believe me yours unspeakably obliged),
I noticed whoever I met in my search for entrance
into this world went too far (but that was their
destination) and I noticed the road followed roughly
the route of a zipper around a closed case,
I noticed the sea was human but no one believed me,
and that some birds have the wingspan of an inch
and some flowers the petal span of a foot yet the two
are very well suited to each other, I noticed that.
There are eight major emotional states but I forget
seven of them, I can hear the ambulance singing
but I don’t think it will stop for me,
because I noticed the space between the waterfall and
the rock and I am safe there, resting in
the cradle of all there is, the way a sea horse
(when it is tired) will tie its tail to a seaweed
and rest, and there has not been, in my opinion,
enough astonishment over this fact, so now I will
withdraw my interest in the whole external world
while I am in the noticing mode, notice how I
talk to you just as if you were sitting on my lap
and not as if it were raining, not as if there were
a sheet of water between us or anything else.

Mary Ruefle

Selected Poems, Wave Books, Seattle WA, 2010, pages 132-133.

And from September in Michigan, deer graze in light rain. See how it darkens their coats?