"that life of helpless flight"

Tornado Crossing

They've followed me for years, the torqued
and humid pressures, the masses
of wrangling air. August afternoons
I found myself with a good pitching arm
and a first crop of acne, a boy among boys,

until they came, draining out of the wet
green belly of the sky. By the time
the sirens sounded, the air was full
of white lime and shredded yellow jerseys,
and I was weightless, whirling over the houses
of my fathers. It's been like this ever since:

lovers have lost me in the air, and great poems,
whole treatises of reason, have been ripped
from my hands to rain out over, I don't know,
Kansas, maybe. More than once
I've found myself turning to say something
beautiful, then suddenly looking far down

at someone waving a bewildered goodbye.
This is how I've moved through all my lives,
whipped up and torn apart, rained down
and remade, different clothes, new skin.
Only my voice has remained the same.
Sometimes I'd go to sleep and wake up

in a different timezone, on a rooftop
in North Dakota, Wisconsin, Nebraska,
anywhere a tornado has ever been. I ran
for days and years, deep into deserts
and forests, into places where, by virtue

of physics, tornadoes should not exist.
For awhile in California I was whirlwind-free,
and that life of helpless flight became
a running joke. By my front door

I posted a sign that read, "Tornado Crossing,"
in thick black letters. My neighbors laughed,
their perfect faces crinkling like plastic wrap.
The sign was levity and wit until the green sky,
the sirens, the perfect identical houses aloft

like stucco zeppelins, their windows popping
like balloons. And I woke to this life,
a displaced citizen, alone in a lonely city.
So far the weather is beautiful, all sun
and careless breezes, though lately I wake

with my ears popping and my tears staining
the ceiling. And just yesterday, down the street,
it rained baseballs. You should have seen it.
The damage was immense.

This Preston Mark Stone poem was taken from the lit journal Gravity. You can find lots more of Preston's work here.