NOTICING

Now, when you notice things, there’s someone else there.

Crows lope away from us with a look that knows our atrocities.
The back garden in Wednesday rain heaves out godlessness.
Sunlight shines through the rim of a baby’s nostril.
Airports murmur the secret all governments fear: there aren’t nations, only people.

Now, when you notice these things, there’s someone else there with you.

Noticing used to happen without you noticing it:
A girl’s nude armpit like an opal,
The sea’s look of marbled meat,
A bare winter tree like a cross-sectioned lung.
You woke up, noticed, went to bed dumbly enriched.

Now, when you notice these things, there’s someone else there with you.

In the kitchen, after an evening in separate conversations,
You put your hands on your wife’s midriff – and there she is again,
All that you’d forgotten.
Desire learns cunning or dies.

Now, when you notice her, there’s someone else there with you.

Awake before suburban dawn you master self-ridicule and step
Barefoot onto the lawn’s frost, because after all you can.
And there’s frost revealed: an old patient god
Fragilely attempting an impossible reclamation.

You notice this, but there’s someone else there with you.

You can’t, quite, meet his eye, this companion who showed-up sometime after wisdom teeth or original sin.
But you begin to see your mistake:
Noticing isn’t a gift, a grace, a dispensation, but
Comes at a price, demands exchange,
And as his peripheral smile reminds,

We’ve only the one thing to give.

text - Glen Duncan
image - Catherine Anyango