Holding things with our eyes.

This odd flaky substance, some kind of pollutant I suppose, floats atop a rivulet off the Columbia River. It’s bad news for the creatures who live in the river, but I can’t help finding it interesting. Sue and I found it while exploring Rooster Rock State Park, about half an hour outside of Portland. It was a glorious day: the weather, the delight in each other’s company, the time away from responsibilities and preoccupations. We took a picnic lunch and a book of poetry we have been reading to each other. She painted. I took a few photographs. Simple pleasures.

Here is an excerpt of a prose poem from that book of poetry we’re reading:

To graduate into the world, we are required to memorize practical and odd things: the number of feet in a mile, the year Henry VIII beheaded Anne Boleyn, the degree at which clouds will freeze their rain. But since death is the mirror we eventually move through, let’s stop carrying the things we repeat and start holding things with our eyes. To know by heart is to warm the broken as they lay down in the sand of our eyes.
--conclusion of a prose poem called “To Know by Heart,” by Mark Nepo, in Reduced to Joy.

I also took a more conventional photo of where we were.  Sadly, the river is now on “red alert” for pollution.

One more thing: Sue and I both love an Edward Lear poem called "The Jumblies," which includes these lines:

And each of them said, "How wise we are!
Though the sky be dark, and the voyage be long,
Yet we never can think we were rash or wrong,
While round in our Sieve we spin!"

We, and most of the world, have gone to sea in a Sieve, happy in our delusions.