Zero by Wendell Berry

"Zero"
   by Wendell Berry
The river steams in the cold.
Aboe it the streams 
impend, lcok like iron
in the frozen hollows. The cold
reaches of the sky
have leapt onto the ground.
But the wren's at home
in the cubic acre of his song.
House and shed and barn
stand up around their lives
like songs. And I 
have a persistent music in me,
like water flowing under ice,
that says the warmer days 
will come, blossom and leaf
return again.  I live in that,
a flimsy enclosure,
but the song's for singing,
not to dread the end.
The end, anyhow, is always here.
It is the climate we sing in.
A man may ease off into it
any time, like a settler,
tired of farming, starting out
silently into the woods.
On a day like this we have
the end in sight. This is zero,
the elemental poverty
of all that was ever born,
in which nothing lives by chance
but only by choosing to
and by knowing how -- and by 
the excess of desire that rises
above the mind, surrounding
and hovering like a song.