Up from the south it came, out of the
west, at a diagonal,
fifty miles in its full course,
once it was done—and in its body length, each
time it touched down, from a mile long
to twenty miles. “All we could see
was a lot of gray and stuff.” “It was like
a train, but much louder.” “All we saw was this
white wall of water, if you will.”
Witnesses reported funnel
clouds setting down eleven times, like
anteater noses looking for something,
or a grayish teat growing down
to search out and eat,
but of course it was just cold and heat,
wet and dry, wind, counter-
clockwise force. One life
ended, within a collapsed home,
curled around her stepson’s infant son.
Some homes almost disappeared,
as if the atoms that had made them were gone,
and many homes now partially stand, as if
gored, or chewed on. And how many trees,
how many hairs on a head, torn out,
how many plants turned back from discrete
beings into wads of matter.
Pine, oak, maple, beech,
hemlock, witch hazel, lady’s slipper,
pitcher plant, trillium,
Indian pipe. Gardens, trails—
by a waterfall, a bench, gone in one
bite, dissolved like a grain of salt, as if
thousands of years passed in a minute,
as if we jumped the Pleistocene
to the Hiroshimal. But it’s just weather.
Friend, let us be good to one another.
Sharon Olds
