Harm's Way: Poems

Earthquake Weather

Earthquake Weather “Earthquake weather,” the locals mumble and grab another cool one from the fridge. “If you end up staying, you’ll learn to read the signs,” Rigo says, uncaps his longneck, takes a swill. He won’t say much more tonight—and you— you’ve never told me the one thing I most need to hear. Truth is, it’s not that I can’t read the signs, but that I’m too scared to tell you what they say. I’ve loved you to a fault for which there is no name or measure, and we build upon it night after night. Go ahead, pass out. I’ll hold you as I always do. By the dim light of the alarm clock and through the haze of the night’s cocktails, shapes shift: the coat rack becomes a streetlamp, your mother’s photo, a girl I saw on the bus. She ran into an old friend from rehab who wanted to connect. But the girl just yanked her sleeve to show her tracks and said, “You don’t want to find me,” her hand outstretched and trembling. She got off two stops later, but still my mind runs the rail of her thin arm, as if I can find the fault line that lies hidden in us all— the ability we have to love and love completely the thing that kills us best. Maybe Rigo’s right. Maybe if I stay long enough, stand still enough  underneath the doorjamb, I’ll learn to read the jagged hand of the seismograph before it signs our fate. So far all I know is that a fear of endings always blinds us to the beauty in destruction, to that moment in the dreck when a girl wakes to sirens, and in all the fuss of this shaking, shaking world, her hands seem finally still.  ...