Borah Peak Earthquake, 1983

Rebecca Brock

They didn’t mean to frighten me.

I was eight and thought my thick-lensed 

pink-rimmed glasses 

had gone off, the earth, 

solid, but also liquid,

the grown-ups at a loss.

Our parents already at work,

my little sister and I at the neighbor’s—

the man hollering at us to get outside,

the woman shouting at us to stay 

because the ground might open wide, 

might swallow us—and I saw 

how their driveway would crack 

like a prehistoric egg of soil and stone. 

“Again,” my sister called, “again,”

thinking it fun, the ride of it, the shake

the earth was giving us—

like a horse losing patience

with the bridle or the buzzing 

bodies of the flies.

I didn’t know, then, 

how it always feels 

like that when you are grown— 

the push to stay and shelter in place 

or the pull to venture out, 

to take the risk of street, and sky—

all along your indecision 

the solidness of things shifting.