"The Hurricane"...that was the name, wasn't it? Or "The Storm"? She couldn't exactly remember the name or author of the poem. She had read it in her sixth grade reading book: one of the boring thousands she had been forced to read, analyze, and find the meter and rhyme: yet this one moved her to take notice, because it started with the idea that a hurricane came through the telephone. In the poem it ripped through the poet's apartment, and left only broken things wet from the rain for the poet to try and sort through. At the age of twelve she had no real connection to it; she had lived in some ways a charmed life; better than most and worse than some. The poem was filed away in a mental folder marked "school". Yet because of it's novelty it became permanent brain dandruff; destined to make appearances at dream functions and to materialize in bad weather. It wasn't until many years later that she understood what the poem really meant, and began to hate telephones.

I perceived it at first to mean that the hurricane left the apartment, then refused to leave the apartment.

The continuity seems a bit disjointed in the sentence which follows the above.