Most people who daydream their way out of the washing-up picture a beach. The speaker of Anne Scott Musil's "Swimming" does something odder and more honest. Standing in a "littered kitchen", "rubbing dirty pots and hot", she thinks of "still cold dark-green water". The line about the pots breaks off before we learn what is hot, so the heat simply hangs over everything. The two scenes are built as opposites: mess against stillness, heat against cold, scrubbing against floating. Even the pace changes. The kitchen lines are short and clipped, while "still cold dark-green water" piles up heavy, stressed words with no commas between them, so the line itself seems to slow and sink. The aside "(a poor swimmer)" is tucked into brackets, as if the admission were made under the breath. If it is deliberate, it is also telling that the kitchen "i" is lowercase while the swimming "I" is capitalised.
The second stanza reveals that the swim is a stand-in. The "other" plunging is "meditation", a word held back behind a dash and given a line to itself, like an answer finally let out. What the speaker wants is not to escape "the messy heat / of pots food talk" but to dive "without / leaving them". The line break does a small trick here: the line ends on "without", so the poem briefly steps out of its sentence before returning to it. "Plunging rising" fits the pool, but it also fits hands going down into hot dishwater and coming up again, which may be why the two scenes blur.
Then comes the problem. "But how do that" is blunt and half-ungrammatical, the way thinking aloud is. The verbs now appear as "rising plunging", their order flipped, as though up and down are no longer easy to tell apart. "Scrubbing hot" echoes the opening "rubbing … hot", and the gritty sounds of "scrubbing" and "scouring" rub against each other. This is the poem's only question mark, and it lands on a funny, tender demand: "how love my pots my / scouring pad?" The repeated "my", split across a line break, makes the love sound both sincere and slightly absurd, since a scouring pad is hardly the obvious object of devotion. That mix of humour and earnestness is much of the poem's charm.
The last stanza lets the body and the mind interrupt. "Attention will dissolve" brings back the water imagery, but now it is concentration that melts away, not the speaker who sinks into calm. "Sore feet itches" is a list with no punctuation, a pile of petty distractions that arrive all at once. Then the tone turns studious: "I have read / that teaching's best / or just the mantra sound". The speaker is relying on reading, not on expertise, and seems as poor a meditator as she is a swimmer. The syntax goes loose here. "That" is never pinned down, though the sense seems to be that a teaching, or just the sound of a mantra, can keep attention steady. The poem offers two possible helps and commits to neither. Its final word, "wordlessly", points beyond language, which is a neat paradox for a poem made entirely of words.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. Sound works inside the lines (hot and pots, rubbing and scrubbing, plunging and rising) instead of at their ends. Almost nothing is punctuated, so the poem reads like a mind drifting from task to thought and back, and it simply stops without a full stop.
That refusal to tie things up is where the poem's significance lies. It takes a chore that is usually seen as an interruption of the "real" inner life and asks whether the inner life could happen inside it. It does not pretend the answer is easy. The speaker is distracted, sore and unsure, and the poem trusts that honest struggle is more interesting than a calm success. For a reader, the effect is quietly practical: the deep water may not be somewhere else, but it still has to be reached from the sink.