Warm air rises and forms a cumulus cloud. It keeps rising, and the cloud churns into a thunderstorm. One thunderstorm in every 10,000 breeds a tornado. One tornado in a hundred gains enough speed to rank as an F4 on the Fujita scale of intensity. An F4 is categorically devastating. One tornado in a thousand is even worse than devastating. The winds of an F5 swirl us beyond belief. According to T. Theodore Fujita — a researcher seen here to resemble a ruthless whirlwind himself — in an F5, “incredible phenomena can occur.”

On April 3, 1974, 148 tornadoes touched down in North America, scarring the continent from Decatur, Ill., to Roanoke, Va. One F5 and one F4 cut through Limestone County, Ala., the focal point of Mark Levine’s account of the storm. Levine is best known as a poet, though not an exceptional one, but here he turns the laconic detail, thorough compression and rhythmic nuance of his best verse to sensational use, producing a work of reportage so artfully structured and emotionally moving that it looks pretty good next to “In Cold Blood.” If nothing else, both books deal in true crime: the people of Limestone were guilty of being alive, and the prosecutor was elaborately vicious. “Wind,” Levine writes, “makes its own expansive jurisdiction.”

Limestone had been lazing through the ’70s. Cotton was not quite king; between the new nuclear plant and the NASA hub in nearby Huntsville, things were floating along. The county was dry and the segregation de facto. The propriety was Christian, and the tornadoes hit on a midweek church night. Let me rephrase that: Limestone was hit. Disaster happens in the passive voice, and its victim hits a full stop fast. Thus, at the A&W in downtown Xenia, Ohio, “the assistant manager was mortally wounded by a hurtling stainless steel countertop.” Thus, in Indiana, “a pregnant woman was thrown into a tree and killed.” Levine’s prose darts and blocks ahead without spin or pathos or a moment to sigh.

In the early chapters, the author digs deep into the biographies of a half-dozen citizens of Limestone (a Vietnam vet, a sharecropper’s son, teenage lovers in their ruby-red Mustang) and then traces their motions minutely. Once a few of the afflicted have memorable faces, all of them have souls, and the apocalypse can proceed with horrible beauty. Weather like the April 3 outbreak inspires awe, and Levine shrewdly collates eyewitness accounts and burnishes impressions so as to catch the grandeur of the day cinematically — ringing in the clouds and comprehensive shock in the streets, Blake light in the skies and a station wagon up in the oaks, a hundred yards from the driveway. It’s sublime.

To quibble with “F5,” start with Levine’s notion that those tornadoes roared through a country numbed by Vietnam and Watergate and entertaining itself only with nostalgia and schlock. First, the day that America stops pacifying herself with schlock is the day I move to France. Second, it isn’t true. Yes, “The Sting” won an Oscar on April 2 (and “American Graffiti” was nominated), and, yes, the defining genre of the time was the disaster film, “predicated on bearing witness to turmoil from a protective distance.” But has Levine ever seen “The Godfather?” What about “Harold and Maude,” which, he notes, was scheduled on a double bill at Limestone’s Hatfield Drive-In that coming weekend? How did he forget Robert Altman? Is that an Oedipal thing? In 1974, Altman was in the middle of the provocative hot streak that started with “M*A*S*H” and peaked at “Nashville” — a masterpiece that, like “F5,” zips among narrative lines and pulls in unexpectedly on the stricken expressions of tertiary characters and looks without sentiment at an American tragedy.