Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words. . .

~ Excerpt from Ursula K. LeGuin

It’s dry ice; only four degrees out so I decide to swim this morning and walk later. I find a meditative rhythm. I practice enjoying every stroke, stroke, stroke, turn of my head and open mouth into breath. I swim for forty minutes enjoying my time. It’s warm here. I sense a poem coming from this swim. Will I have time to draft it before it’s gone? It’s a summer poem I’m thinking about, an outdoor swim, from a picture I have of a swimmer in Farm Pond that I took one morning from friend’s high path down to the water’s edge. I make the time once I am at my desk and a draft comes that I take to a monthly poetry workshop meet up I go to. I feel glad that I’ve gotten the draft. It’s begun, not done, and I like where it went and I’m curious about where it’s going. To get to my office I must go through the plastic, zipped up, two layers of plastic and zippers, or go outside across the deck, which is what I choose since the men are working on tearing up floors in the rooms. Blasted by cold, I think, Kelly, remember the poem you love by Ursula K. LeGuin, the lines, Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing and your outbreath be the shining of ice. So, when I breathed across the deck I went into the enchantment of this poem. In the afternoon before workshop and then an appointment I went out with the dogs planning to go pretty far, but I got involved with the fantastic ice and all the pictures. Never left the property. The dogs were not unhappy. Tonight I went back to the office to make sure the heat was turned down and decided to go through the zips. Closing the zippers on my return I heard my mother’s voice, Close it quick and all the way––don’t let the mosquitoes in! And, for a flash of a moment I was in our big family tent on Uncle Donn’s hill on the way to my sleeping bag after dark. Smell of canvas and repellant and music of crickets, feet wet from night grass.