Song against Reductionism.

A pretty wet snow covers our muddy world — temporarily, for sure, a grace of sugar snow in a long mud season. Early March, and I’m already hanging the laundry out to dry, the pale green nubs of perennial bulbs pushing up through matted debris of last year’s leaves, broken twigs.

On a warm afternoon, I put the snow shovel away — my usual blind enthusiasm about spring! I’m the woman who rails against reduction, that the world can be defined as this or that. This world is nothing but gray, an unending smear of thaw and freeze. And yet, I’m wrong about that, too. Daily, the bird chorus gains, the winged creatures flocking in the box elders in the ravine behind my house, feasting at the feeder in the mock orange.

A poem from the late David Budbill:

“What Issa Heard”

Two hundred years ago Issa heard the morning birds

singing sutras to this suffering world.

I heard them too, this morning, which must mean,

since we will always have a suffering world,

we must also always have a song.