I’ve heard it said they’re like trains when they come,
that they change lives or take them away.
Remember how as a child you first learned
whirling could alter your world, how you spun
until the ground heaved, caught you in its lap,
how you stretched out awed beneath the sprawl
of a tossing sky?. . .Imagine if you can
the dark funnel fingering its way
across the plains, finding you lost in thought,
plucking you up, mind a violent gyration.
If you come to, it’s beside a rusty wheelbarrow
pitched upside down, its single wheel a roulette
reckless, and clothes like the husks of angels
fluttering down around you, silent on the grass.