Dave Bonta's "January Rain" is ten lines long, yet it moves from self-mockery to something close to reverence. The weather is wrong for the month: rain where snow should be, a bird singing out of season, woods drained of colour. The speaker does not resent any of it. He lets the mud in, and by the end that gives him a strange kind of grace. The poem's central idea is that a dreary, in-between moment can still be luminous, and that loss and beauty can sit in the same view.
The opening couplet sets the tone with a joke at the speaker's own expense. He is "first cousin to mud, soft-shouldered," and he "turn[s] to quagmire." The body and the ground blur together. "Soft-shouldered" also sounds like the soft shoulder of a road, so a human slump and a waterlogged verge are described by one word. That is my inference, but the poem's wordplay invites it. Then comes a line of French, "Ou sont les neiges?", which echoes Villon's famous refrain about the snows of long ago. Bonta cuts off the "of yesteryear" part, and the question becomes plain and local: where has the snow gone? An old lament for vanished things is applied to a muddy yard, which is both funny and sincere.
The second and third couplets move indoors and out, and they mix the holy with the domestic. It is "God's rain on the roof," but the house shakes because of "the washing machine's dervish waltz." A dervish suggests ecstatic, spiritual spinning, and a waltz suggests a ballroom, so a chore becomes a sacred dance. The sentence about God is flat and matter-of-fact, which keeps the poem from sounding pious. Divinity is just part of the household noise.
On the porch the senses sharpen. A winter wren sings a "summertime song," and its notes are "thin boneless notes." The word "boneless" picks up the softness of the first couplet, and the lack of bone sounds like the thaw itself. The song seems as unsupported as the speaker and the soil. Its summery sound in January also repeats the poem's theme of things being out of place. The enjambment across "winter wren's / summertime song" puts the two seasons in one phrase, so the line break holds the contradiction.
The final two couplets change the poem's grammar. The first half has an "I" ("I turn," "I hear"), but the last four lines have no speaker and the final one has no verb at all. Having "turned to quagmire," the speaker dissolves into the scene and only looks. What he sees is the locust trunks, "turned green from all the rain." Bonta doesn't say why they are green, so the colour reads as a small miracle. Then come "Green columns glowing in the dim light." The hard *g* sounds (green, columns, glowing) make the line shine in the mouth as well as in the eye. "Columns" suggests architecture, and together with the earlier "God's rain" it hints at a church interior, though that is the reader's inference rather than something the poem says.
The last line undercuts the glow: "The gray-brown ruin of a woods beyond." It does not cancel what came before. "Ruin" fits the architectural image, since a ruined building is still a building, and it carries a faint echo of Villon's sadness at what time destroys. The hyphenated "gray-brown" and the repeated *g* connect the dead woods to the bright trunks, so the two belong to one picture.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The poem is in unrhymed couplets with lines of uneven length, which suits the loose, wet, off-balance mood. The couplets pair things: self and mud, house and rain, bird and season, green and gray. The ending keeps both halves of each pair and doesn't resolve them.
The poem is worth reading for how much it holds in so little space. It combines a medieval French lament, a spinning washing machine, a bird, and a few wet trees, and it avoids both gloom and easy cheer. It suggests that attention is a form of grace, and that the speaker can only see the glow in the green columns once he has accepted becoming mud.