Observe
“You see, but you do not observe.”
I bought the two-volume set used
In Tulsa for seventy-five cents and walked
Up those seventeen steps to a place more
Real than real, with bullet holes celebrating
V R on her golden jubilee, tobacco in the toe
Of a Persian slipper, and all the blessed rest,
Imagined only a decade after a wire had said
“Come here, Mister Watson, I want you,” but
I never could observe like Holmes. However,
I learned Doyle’s trick of working backward.
The next summer I saw a Van Gogh wheat field
After seeing real ones from Oklahoma to Manitoba
And knew Van Gogh had observed and I had not.
I have used the trick since, all over the world:
For instance in the Galapagos, feeling soft-spined
Cacti, watching the variously beaked finches,
Seeing the terrifying subversive inevitability
Of Darwin’s Bible-defying insight; and again
In Trier with the wedding-cake episcopal palace
Close by the brooding Roman Empire gate below
The robber baron cliffs and above the laden river
Observed in all their successions by young Marx;
Closer to home in a plane above the linking portage
Of the Fox and Wisconsin rivers, I missed nothing
Because Turner growing up there missed nothing.
I believe that someone somewhere is observing:
A computer screen in Bangalore, an up to now
Unknown orchid in New Guinea, a microscope or
Telescope revealing wonders in Kiev or Kinshasa.
Observing fends off the speckled band, the hound,
Even the giant rat of Sumatra, that is elementary.
--J. Quinn Brisben
26 APR 2005
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