A Huddle of Blue Boats

What could be calmer?

I've been having rough seas myself this week, and find my spirit greatly agitated.  I would love to be sitting in a blue boat, and learning—as I dreamed recently—to row.

Once I did know how to row, very inexpertly.  My father took me out on Wisconsin's Bone Lake when we were staying there one summer vacation, with my grandmother, in a wooden cottage where skunks lived under the porch.

This, then, instead of being in a boat, from "Poetry" by Billy Collins:

We are busy doing nothing—
and all we need for that is an afternoon,
a rowboat under a blue sky,

and maybe a man fishing from a stone bridge,
or, better still, nobody on that bridge at all.

image:   John Hair