How exactly good it is
to know myself
in the solitude of winter,

my body containing its own
warmth, divided from all
by the cold; and to go

separate and sure
among the trees cleanly
divided, thinking of you . . .

~ Excerpt from “The Cold,” By Wendell Berry

To not sleep in is nice. It’s fresh and cold. The river is calmly swollen. The brook has scattered splatches of ice. I walk and look for pictures in the wetlands, and I take many, but keep walking and feeling as if I have not found one I really wanted. I want the one that will make me smile all day. I want the image that will stay in my eyes and my mind and remind me of peace and cheerfulness and the pleasure of the moment. I want the beautiful one. I head home along the trail, accepting that it won’t come to me today. Then, as I take the narrow trail from Rocky woods onto our property, I see in the sprawling patch of wetlands beside me on the ground the bright bright green, the evergreen of a frozen fern, as if these fronds that unfurled along this ground last June have been preserved in ice. They are still and greenly under an ice frame. Here is exactly what I was looking for to take home with me today. I go cheerfully on to my poetry workshop and I’m glad to be there. The revision I’ve brought of my angel poem is generally appreciated; I’ve advanced it. But there’s more, I know, and I get an idea of what it needs. But I will leave it momentarily. i need a new poem for Thursday. Perhaps, tomorrow, a new draft will come, as a pleasant surprise, like the wintergreen fern in ice.