“I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them…”

If you’re ever traveling the Columbia River Gorge and have a chance to stop at the Bonneville Dam visitors center (Oregon side), they have a sturgeon hatchery and pool where you can see 6-8 foot fish up-close.

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled, and barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
–the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly–
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
–It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
–if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels–until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

Elizabeth Bishop

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/04/penis-snake-photos-amazon-brazil-atretochoana-eiselti_n_1742088.html

My first recognition was not penis, but what a soldier’s dump looks like after one week of eating MRE’s. No dump for the first three days and then, oh my gawd, c’mere Rodriguez and look at this.

Am I right? I’ve had some of those MRE dumps stand straight up and salute me! I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello.

38 to 54 inches.

It grew in the telling.

Okay. I know it’s important to maitain but can we start hitting people now?

No. Of course not. Because the rule is, live by the sword, die by the sword, and the sword, here, is the truth about these numnuts. We are going to see the LA tape and many other revelatory background facts. Mark my words and don’t doubt me. (That’s Rush Limbaugh language and I love it.) But, the point is, the numnuts have opened themselves up, spiritually, by their actions. And now they have made themselves fair game.