Winter Rain in California

A wet windshield
reveals
a river by the highway
swollen to a lake
spread through farms and orchards
marshy mud fields
that winter rain reclaims.

Spouts
flooding rain barrels
produce
unexpected ponds
around our domicile
especially the bed
laboriously dug for sand
and buckwheat
that's the deepest
waterhole of all.

A lesson in the
pointlessness
of amending rock hard to gooey clay
for native plants,
and also the futility
of planting in the pretence
we can modify the ecosystem
except in the wrong direction.