Dry Spring
Paul McLaughlin
Driving home from town
I pass a half-built subdivision.
A spiral of dust swirls up
spins around half-buried lot markers
and rattles against my car
like dry rain.
In the woodlots the poplars
struggle to crochet a sparse coverlet of leaves
a transparent yellowish shawl
that barely covers the shoulders of the trees.
On the hillsides the grass is still
the winter-dead colour of desert
sandstone.
A bewildered vee of Canada geese circles over acres
of exposed slough-bottom
and lifeless rushes.
Their home has gone to ground
first a pond surrounded by mud
then a puddle surrounded by mud
now a shallow bowl of hard dry cracked black mud.
Ahead of me a raincloud piles up
and turns black-bottomed.
The parched fields reach up
like nests of baby robins when a mother-
shadow passes overhead.
The cloud-bottom loses definition
soft streamers of rain drift down
and evaporate before they reach the ground.
I wash a thin film of fine dust
off our once-white patio chairs
and watch the sky for signs of rain.
There are no song-birds this year
only an acetylene torch sun
in a propane flame sky.
May 2001
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