Michael Metivier

When the townspeople gave the teenaged Buddha a glass of wine so delicious he grew to an unthinkable size and froze into a blue statue that shielded the town from a wave that broke upon his back and would have swept away the town if he’d not tasted the wine and afterward the people were overjoyed and said they would do good deeds like carpool their children to school more often and plant lettuce everywhere while the Buddha melted into water and receded into the calm sane sea.

We take more than our share, Several dozen from the star- Flecked cove of a red maple Pond, fins tapered like steeples, Gill to gill in the bucket And bilge, drawn from a thicket Of drowned roots Into the night’s cool garrotes. Sorrowful brothers Choking on strange ethers, Striving, eager, bent Toward the sky by want: It was not to be, this breathing, Though not for nothing.

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.