And Now It Sings

She stands in wet and likes it; drips rolling around the brim of her split-bamboo conical

hat to fall on thirsting clay. Here's weather at last, there having been sun,

sun, sun, a lip-cracking and tree-splitting dry, since the vernal equinox. Nothing

had been vernal about it, and her land knew so. The very fir limbs sulked;

willows on creek banks browned up and died; birds fell everlastingly silent, dropping

on needle-sharp tufts of what had been haymow beneath their perches in rattling cedars;

fish sought pools deeper than any there were, crowding in together, fin by fin,

gulping and grunting, then rolling over to bump along hot, slimed rocks and lodge

somewhere, stinking. Her crops had miniaturized, flavorful but insufficient to pay her labor;

She'd lost heart and let vining morning glories into her cracked farm at last. And now here

comes weather. Not enough to top off the well, maybe, and certainly not enough to start the creek.

But here she stops, catching chill -- watching a goldfinch settle on fence wire with a twist

of foraged thistledown. It drops the meal, opens its beak, cranes skyward. And now it sings.