How many turns in place
on the school playground—your head
flung upward, your eyes looking
straight at the steeple of the church
next to the gym— before you're
gripped with vertigo or tip ground-
ward? Once, on TV, a seismologist
offered: what if, between the big magnitude
quakes that flatten cities, disrupt
our lives and push lava out of volcano
cones, the tiny, daily tremors beneath
the earth are too fast, too close together
so they register on the needle
as a line we think is flat? There are
towns with roofs still sunk in
hardened clay; buried belfries and plaster
saints whose cloth robes have turned
the color of dust, whose heads now
resemble shredded dandelions. Stippled
indentations on walls mark the places
where birds careened out of the mouths
of cliffs, colliding with their own
displacement. I can't imagine how it is
that a tortoise holds up the pillar of
the world; how a legless snail holds
tight to this surface of trembling filaments.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.