The speaker begins weighed down. He's buried in accidents, old weather, and the kind of no-news that almost never turns out to be good. He compares himself to the broken tablets Moses carried down from the mountain: fragmented and impossible, something that can't be put back together. It's a wry, tired image, and the humor in it keeps the self-pity from getting too heavy.
Then the poem looks up. Above him a crabapple tree in bloom becomes a pink Sinai, a mountain of its own, crowded with hornets, bees, and slender ichneumon wasps. A catbird, singing in scraps, sits in the branches and darts out to snatch stinging insects from the air. Nothing here is gentle, yet it is alive and abundant.
The mood shifts from gloom to wonder. The speaker doesn't announce a cure for his mood. The poem simply sets the busy, ordinary tree against his broken feeling and lets the contrast do the work. The title, "Otherwise," hints at another way of seeing things.