After a punishing drought, a woman stands in the rain and lets it soak her. The opening images catalogue the damage: a split-bamboo hat dripping onto thirsty clay, cracked lips and split trees, willows browning, birds falling silent, fish dying in shallow hot water, crops too small to pay for the work. She has lost heart and let morning glories take over her cracked farm. Then the weather shifts just slightly. The rain won’t refill the well or start the creek, but she pauses, chilled, as a goldfinch lands on a fence wire with a bit of thistledown. It drops the fluff, lifts its beak, and sings. The speaker’s feeling is weary but attentive—hope arrives not as a solution, but as a small living sound. The mood moves from dry exhaustion to fragile, hard-won openness, as if the land and the woman both remember how to answer.
And Now It Sings — Summary
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.