Her Lips Tectonic – Raye Hendrix

 

I read once about earthquakes

how they’re caused when fissures

 

in the earth spread open

and I’ve forgotten the word for it

 

but it’s something like

what I told a girl I used to love

 

one July night beneath her

in the clover-grass: told her

 

to watch how her father’s blue

hydrangeas pushed against

 

the fence, see the way

the thin vines fingered

 

through the rain-softened

wood, told her how eventually

 

it would break down

the posts if the tender ends

 

weren’t pruned. She pinched

one off and pressed the severed

 

twist against my mouth

held it there with her own lips

 

and said she understood

said maybe that’s how people

 

break down too—but now

I love a man who studies bodies

 

of water, the way they split

the earth: slowly, only stealing

 

a few inches of ground

every hundred or so years.

 

I ask how something soft

can break a world of stone

 

 

ask him to name the thing

that causes earthquakes.

 

He says they’re called fault

lines in the study of tectonics

 

tells me how water finds

the cracks and freezes, how

 

it pushes out—but he says

nothing of clover or hydrangeas

 

or the way the fences fail

to hold the soft parts in.