A Random Poem Book

Advection Blues By Michael Metivier

  The mower alone
saw from the median
the cloud come over
the mountain down to trawl
the valley like a whale
and the swifts like water
passing through her white baleen.

The mower alone patrolling
the haw with the hawks
saw from the median
the cloud come over
the mountain to swallow
where the sky had been
and where the town had been
pinned by steeples
and hummed electric hubris.

For everyone else
on either side of the narrow
the cloud was only a minute
of a single verse
because the highway treats the blues
as all the same as if Bentonia
were Sunflower County
but the land between the lanes
even while under the blades
sees the power in every cloud
and hears each song spiral out
of an old familiar tune just so
to devour our hearts.