…quand’io senti’, come cosa che cada,
tremar lo monte; onde mi prese un gelo
qual prender suol colui ch’a morte vada.
—Canto 20, lines 127–129
And so, the tremors tense and tune
the house-frame, and we adjust our steps
and sleep accordingly. Everywhere
the markers, fracture zones, radiating
purities of shakedown, vibrations
wrenching circles out of straight line,
emanating over paddocks and prepositions,
chattering teeth and psyches
of dust-dry evenings—then it seems
more likely forms will come unstuck: with rain
water runs to fill the gaps, dew
quivers on a eucalypt leaf
to drop and disperse, sink to where
shaking begins, or where shaking
observes innate laws and ghosts
don’t feel a thing. But here, no matter
how far we rush from helter-skelter
of proliferating epicentres, the call
barely settles us: ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo’,
and again, ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo’,
like a lift from Quotable Quotes;
and to steady the addiction—
a homeopathy—we travel up past
the great epicentre of colonial
memory, Meckering, damn-near
centre of the Great Quake of ’68,
travelling, travelling to Cunderdin,
where Mum still teaches—occasionally—
at the ag school—English
and plant science woven to salt
scalds, woven among targeted
poisoning and animal husbandry—travelling
to the Cunderdin Museum,
housed in an old Golden Pipeline
pumping station, vast steam engine
that pushed water up to the waterless,
up to the thirsty scouring the goldfields…
therein, inside the museum, a replica house
with a shaker below the floorboards,
set in motion by the push of a button:
a shaking house, an earthquake house,
a rural house with pioneering overtones
though late ’60s in derivation, a verandah
to look out from, to ride the rippling surface,
that terrifies then amuses children,
furnishings and paraphernalia
crashing down and the world around
the earthquake house standing stock-still,
as museums will. This region is obsessed…
and lives taken are lives risen,
‘Gloria in excelsis Deo’ sung to them,
the compaction of time, intensity
of moment, rendering hot and cold,
elation and desperation as a blur
of colours, of tastes, of pumps,
and trains, and stonework cracking,
charging towards illuminism.