Advection Blues

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.