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The Earthquake This wasn’t earthquake country. The world was sound and still, a great turtle sleeping for peaceful decades on the sunny sea of everything else. Here marriages endured; children were safe from their parents; long labor was enough. Here things seemed what they were. Nor was it like the books, like places where the earth rippled and bucked, stood up and shook off its chains. This was the dark of the morning, five o’clock, an awakening to vibration: steady, soft, a buzz or a hum, a tremor like the first faint signatures of nerve disease. But I knew, though it took sleepy moments to recall. I knew that under these hard mountains ran a fault. I knew that though no one could see the break, the alteration, everything for years ahead would change. I sat up and reached out my hand to feel that deep soft shaking of the walls. I said earthquake, and I named that fault, I took it for my own. Catherine Carter’s first book, The Memory of Gills, came out in August 2006 with LSU, and won the 2007 NC Roanoke-Chowan award from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. Her work has previously appeared in Poetry, Tar River Poetry, Cider Press Review, and North Carolina Literary Review, among others, is due to appear in Best American Poetry 2008, and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart; this year it has won the North Carolina Writers’ Network’s Randall Jarrell award. She directs the English education program at Western Carolina University. On the statistically unlikely chance that you may choose to hear more biography than this, her website has more than anyone generally wants, at http://paws.wcu.edu/ccarter/. next table of contents |
