THE GOOD SIGNS

Sunday evening, pickup loads of snow
file down the road to town: snowmen
for Visalia, Exeter, Farmersville front yards

to melt and soak into drought-brown lawns
no one’s mowed in years—a hurried
shortcut from mountains to Valley

upon a crumbling blacktop channel—
water that these oaks and sycamores
see only as lumps of white passing at fifty.

The west and south slopes fill-in
with green, purple patches of frost-bitten
filaree that looked like bare dirt,

softly embrace us now as if we were cattle.
Too wet for work that waits outside,
we slowly release winters of urgency

camped at the door and ease into the
vaguely familiar—reacquaint ourselves
with mud and rain, with one another.