The volcano in my grandmother’s Mexican village
smothered the town, though the girl escaped because
the axis of revolution sent her family into exile,

black clouds covering their journey to the north.
The axis of the earth is a skeletal bone extending
from pole to pole, the arm of someone holding on.

The Japanese earthquake shifted the axis of the earth,
moving Japan twelve feet closer to North America,
each day shortened by one second.

When a poet said the past never happens because
it is always present, the other one proclaimed the past
is in the future, the axis bending to allow these words

to skip the water like stones thrown by a boy in
search of his father, the axis of yesterday sinking
the stones the boy hurled across the pond.