LIVING ON THE EDGE, 10/17/89

LIVING ON THE EDGE, 10/17/89
          –for Susan Swartz

I yell at the cats fighting in the basement,
my cabin dips and sashays a slow dance toward the creek.
The mirror sways in supplication, oak trees shimmy,
acorns, falling hailstones, scolding squirrels and cats
aren't to blame, the deep growling is the earth itself.
Half-dressed, I run outside, laughing with neighbors,
there is almost a festive air, the ground undulating
beneath bare feet, a small boat on a bilious sea.
Eerie static fills the airwaves, when news finally breaks,
we are voyeurs watching events unfold on TV.
The Bay Bridge, a toy drawbridge, toy cars,
a mile and a half of collapsed freeway, Cypress St.,
a roller coaster bed, with cars sandwiched underneath,
bottles of unbroken wine no one scavages,
a column of literate smoke from the Berkeley Library.
The Marina's on fire and sinking, someone says.
A B-grade disaster movie upstaging the World Series`
and space shuttle to Jupiter. Atlantis rising.
The Ferry Building clock stops at 5:04 pm.
Women jog with firehoses, victory streamers,
bikers carry the old ones to safety on their backs.
Just five minutes from the street of death,
my exlover interjects how he's single again
and of the two women living in his house.
4It takes a 7.0 on the Richter Scale to break the ice
but patterns of behavior limit us. Rescuers,
out of body bags, switch to sleeping bags, who will help them?
Gallons of paint, spilled rainbows, symbol of hope,
my friends draw arches in the dirt to heal themselves.
The Pacific plate leaps ahead of the American plate`
in a slow race toward home—Alaska. Terremoto.
Like a war zone, as the landfill liquefies into jelly,
rubble from the 1906 quake rises to the surface

 in a horrible resurrection
of chaos, a system of physics, wild and convoluted.

Parking garages squash
into cement pancakes. Apartments fall, card houses. 

Already the dispossessed talk of rebuilding on the ruins.
Fissures in the streets boggles the mind.
In the time it took God to make the universe, the ballgame
is rescheduled. Disaster transcends the World Series.
When Gorbachev offers aid, many weep.

It takes the heat of Chernobyl & the 25,000 dead of Armenia 

to thaw the Cold War. Thousands homeless.

VP Quail smiles photogenically in the face of tragedy.
Bush calls up to say his presence would be a distraction,
then changes his mind. Though scientists claim there's no such thing
as earthquake weather, it's hot, still, like April 18, 1906.
We've become impatient with the notion of the unseen, the unexplainable.
Children are hearing things, closer to nature they feel it sooner.
With phone lines jammed, I don't even know if my mother is alive,
I get an obscene phone call. A media carnival descends upon us.
One more good aftershock and the newscastors would sink into the bay.
In a few million years, Los Angeles will be somewhere
off the Bering Straits. Hollywood, USSR.
An occupational hazard of living on the edge of the continent,
we're always waiting for the Big One to strike out.

10/17/89

Forestville

1989 Press Democrat

Susan Schwartz was interviewing me for the Press Democrat for a feature story. Towards the end, I was losing my focus, felt seriously ill. So I cut the interview short and lay down on the bed with a stomach ache so bad, I took my jeans off.

Needless to say the article was upstaged by the Loma Prieta earthquake.