Author’s Note: This poem came out of a visit to Southern California almost a decade after moving to Maryland. I was four years post-divorce and living in a lovely little house on Kent Island, healing. I drove up to the neighborhood where I once lived, in the stark high desert, passing across the San Andreas fault and close to Vasquez Rock (frequently seen in various Star Trek incarnations). It was a bittersweet journey, but also one of closure, and I attempted to capture that experience with both the words and the rhythm of the invented form I used for “Tectonics”.
In California geology is worn on the surface.
Strata of folded rock standing naked
beside highways;
bits of Earth piercing earth;
the violence of formation.
Exposed faults: scorched smell of hot crust fired by the Sun
In Childhood nothing is worn on the surface.
Naked pain folded, ironed,
tucked away;
Injustice piercing Innocence;
the penetration of violence.
Blind-thrust faults: silent save scratchy roach-feet scrabbling.
In Wedlock masks are worn on the surface.
Hope & naked despair folded into
tabletop tea towels;
smoke failing to pierce fog;
the violence of the rift.
Tremors: dreams veined with blood-red ruptures.
On the Eastern Shore: green-fawn fluff & grey-blue rippled silk are worn on the surface.
Naked insight unfolding in discrete
increments;
Wisdom piercing Wounds;
the lancing of violence.
Aftershocks salved with crab fat and rain-steeped grass.
Deb Levine writes (mostly) formal poetry, teaches astronomy, and once tried life coaching a chicken. Her verse was first published in Bay to Ocean 2023. Her work has appeared in Bay to Ocean, Sparks of Calliope, and Rue Scribe. She lives in a self-consciously ostentatious house in Pasadena, Maryland with her husband, one cavalier cat, two disorderly dogs, a pair of prosy parrots and eight chickens. She sometimes dreams in sonnet form.
