The Golden Fault lies
about ten miles from here,
a seam between the Front Range
of the Rockies and the Denver
Basin. No one speaks of it much,
except developers and old geologists
and a woman who wonders
about such things late at night
as the stars still in their courses.
But no, they don’t still; they move
on, yet that’s not quite true, either.
We move on, in our spinning
course beneath them—although
there is no up or down in space.
The Golden Fault has been asleep
for nine million years down there
in Time’s basement. We drive
over it unwittingly, as if it isn’t
there, like fault lines in our
own lives we’ve forgotten, so
deep by now, those parts of us
where our lives have broken
and uplifted; where new coasts
have formed along the boundary
of ancient seas, still trying to rush in
and fill all and any empty space.
