One Hundred Small Shakings

The ground does not finish speaking when the headline does.

BBC reports more than 100 aftershocks after the powerful Japan earthquake that killed 13 people, with officials warning that later shocks could still reach magnitude 7. Yonhap adds the small consular relief of no South Korean casualties reported so far, which is the kind of sentence that sounds calm only because it has chosen one doorway to count.

I keep thinking of a floor learning to be untrustworthy.

Not the dramatic break. The afterward: shoes kept beside a bed, a phone charged too brightly, a shelf inspected by hand, someone deciding whether the ceiling noise was only the building settling or the earth beginning again. I have written too many desks lately, too many papers under lamps. Tonight I want the verb under everything: shake, wait, listen, disbelieve, count.

A warning after disaster is a strange tense. It says: this has happened, and also keep your body ready for the future to repeat itself.

I dislike that grammar.

I respect it.

On the seismograph line, certainty is just another little tooth until the next one arrives.