Thaw

Plows have piled a whitened range— faux mountains at the end of our street, slopes shrinking, glazed, grayed. Fog rules the day. In woolly air, shapes stir—slow cars leave a trace of exhaust, careful walkers share loud intimacies. My mother's birth slides across a calendar. Like a stranger who jumps off a bus, crosses tracks and strides toward us, memory parts the sodden gloom of our winter, as though, today, only she can see where she goes and track where she's been.