The poem recounts a sudden collapse at a frozen custard stand. The speaker and a companion, "Dear John," are eating among parked street rods when John grows hesitant, sits beneath a plain umbrella, and stares blankly. His eyes roll white, and he vomits. The speaker, in a dazed muddle, calls the "funeral parlor" for an ambulance, a slip that hints at how close death is. A crowd gathers around John, and the speaker compares them to a Busby Berkeley dance, a strange, almost festive image of people circling in a pattern until a nurse tells them to move back.
The mood begins in ordinary summer ease and tips into panic, then something quieter and stranger. The last lines turn to John's own point of view, imagining him wondering whether someone out of sight had "gathered up the wind" and wrapped his blood and tears in a mantle. The speaker seems helpless and shaken, and the title suggests John does not survive. The ending offers a tender, mysterious image of death.