Marvel Karmix

On or about September 9, 1974,
I, We, Some, All of US, were caught.
We latched on and couldn't let go,
Sluiced into the Marvel Karmix flux
That ripples, HERE.... (no, there....)
Along the precipital outer edge
Of five thousand years of western civilization.

Here where what?

Here, where ocean bedrock rises from beneath the Pacific
To smack and fracture the continental limit
Of Hellenic-Judeo-Christian thought.

Here, where dreamers are dumped out of their dreams
To mill about in the last Promised Land,
Standing in small clusters,
Bewildered pantographs
Turning upon each other,
Aghast at the preposterous scale of it all.

Here where what?

Here, where in 1906, San Francisco burned and was rebuilt,
But where, a few miles up the coast,
Point Reyes took off northward in a single fourteen foot leap.

Here were sundered expectations and actualities,
So much never to be rejoined
That with that leap went any possibility that we,
Seventy years later, would be what we would have been.
We, too (and how many is that?), slipped fourteen feet
Northward, westward, southward, eastward.

We entered the drift.
It opened without limit or dimension,
Save time.

And for a short while,
We basked there,
There in the shadow of the rainbow.