In a Bathroom During an Earthquake

Abstract

In a Bathroom During an Earthquake David Wagoner (bio) You’re caught in the act and have to decide between two unstoppable simultaneous calls of nature while your small apartment sways two of its doors this way and that between you and nine stairs and a landing and nine more stairs down to a quaking earth being pitched and shaken by its tectonic plates. You’d think (if you could think) that of two panic buttons, half-naked self-preservation would come first because nothing much needs to be rescued here (which only a second ago was over there), still undecided, caught in your own stop-time, remembering in spite of yourself the quizzes and shifts and slips of your geology class, that vertical faults like this can have no heave and horizontal faults can have no throw, that footwalls and hanging walls are the two sides of faults on both sides, but you hang in suspense till the earth in its own behalf comes back to order. [End Page 267] David Wagoner David Wagoner has published eighteen books of poems, most recently A Map of the Night (University of Illinois, 2008). Copper Canyon Press will publish his nineteenth, After the Point of No Return, in 2012. He has won the Lilly Prize, six yearly prizes from Poetry, and the Arthur Rense Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches at the low-residency MFA program of the Whidbey Island Writers Workshop. Copyright © 2011 University of North Carolina Wilmington