Tehachapi Earthquake of 1952
Earthquake!
my mother yelled when the bed moved
across the room
just before 5 a.m., July 21, 1952.
She ran
into the street in her nightgown,
Screaming and crying,
the sticky night turning quickly to day.
With no sense
for the White Wolf fault,
where the Tehachapi and Tejon
hills meet the San Joaquin Valley,
or the 7.5 magnitude,
strongest since San Francisco in 1906.
Dogs and cats predicted
the temblor with mysterious good sense,
and hid themselves in safety.
My father, groggy under the sheet,
addressing himself:
Go back to sleep, it’s only an earthquake!
Mother was nowhere around;
she was found two blocks away,
barefoot and afraid
of an earthquake a hundred miles south.
She came home at dawn,
slightly amiss, but innocently sweet.
The Tree that Killed
Chuck Moulton* Is Gone!
The tree,
An Emerald Sunshine Elm,
That killed Chuck Moulton
Is gone!
Cut off at the trunk,
Ground down level
To the pavement and curb.
Vanished from Linden Avenue,
Where the damn thing grew
For nearly fifty years.
And twenty-seven years since
The motorcycle poet
Of the Tower District
Was pruning the tree
From a wooden ladder
With his chainsaw.
A portable power saw
A chain with teeth
Driven by a motor,
Cutting limbs and twigs.
The same saw he used
To cut huge cedars and pines
While fighting forest fires
In the Sierra Nevada.
He fell from the ladder,
Hit his head on the sidewalk,
Lost his grasp
Of an upside-down world.
The tree was his upward path
Along which he proceeded,
Ascending vertically,
Those who pass from visible
To the invisible.
A ladder of ascension
He climbed until he reached
The light of our sun.
*Charles Warrington Moulton (1936-1995)
Stephen Barile is a Fresno, California, native, educated in the public schools, and attended Fresno City College, Fresno Pacific University, and California State University, Fresno. He was a long-time member of the Fresno Poets’ Association. Stephen Barile taught writing at Madera Center College and CSUF and lives in Fresno. His poems have been published extensively, including in Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, The Heartland Review, Instant Noodle, and London Grip.