Thomas Croft’s shirts billowed around his thin frame when the weather shifted.

His mother often said that he had the watery eyes of a mouse,

peeking up from a hole in the soy fields with his box camera

to see if anything was living in the whole state of Oklahoma.

The sky was alive, he knew.

It was everything he wanted to be, in its calm and in its foreign anger;

and he would show its flaws to the world to prove it was just like him.

The 90 mph wind shoved him towards a raw space

and in every direction it pushed he pushed back.

Now the silence pounded across the hillside and

there it was, the great black snake, the sky

hissing and trembling like Goliath with a hole in his head

and ripping strands of hair from the sleeping ground.

The man-mouse who had once dared to weep and join

the chorus of the plains, now

his lens is sick with the diphtheria of western dust-

an aging mortal machine captures an angry angel

on the cover of a postcard.