EARTHQUAKES

 

The old house in Hugo, Minnesota, sat along

Highway 61, and the Northern Pacific line,

whose trains shook the boards to their foundations

again and again throughout the night,

those eerie blue-tinged lights flashing from room

to room, interrogating the darkness

of our sleep, the throaty warning of its whistle

which seemed at once so far and so near.

The walls groaned and the windows trembled

in their ill-fitting frames, the unsteady raft

of my childhood bed shifting course upon the floor.

I imagined that this must be what an earthquake

felt like, what my older sisters reported back

when they visited from California -- the unexpected

shifting of the world's half-sleeping body,

throwing books from their unsteady shelves,

family photos leaving ghost-prints on the eggshell walls.

But their quakes were rare by comparison;

ours arrived nightly, without fail, reminding us

that we couldn't rest for long, and that even here

in the great and frozen Midwest the ground

beneath us was never as certain as we imagined.

Things were always shifting, little tremors everywhere.

It was best to keep moving, and we did.