The aftermath of earthquakes

I am pathetic at critiquing poetry, and in the face of your poetry and I rendered utterly helpless. This is one of my favorites of yours now, I think.

Oh, and I love that I have been to the places in this poem. XD

1.

We reach for one another - a dog barks
in the darkness outside, a beat drops
from a passing car, a door down the hall slams
shut. We are all we have left, we are
I don't think that the break between the line is necessary--if anything, it draws away from the peice. This type of fracture works rarely, and only if the sentence is monumental to begin with. To be quite frank, "we are all we have left, we are all we ever had" is a bit cliche. Perhaps if you worked it into a fresher, more image-based line, the seperation might work. If not, I'd dump the line altogether.

all we ever had. We touch across phone lines,
learning the shaky Braille of boysGreat wordplay!
whose lives have amounted to this: desires played out
on a stage, no spectators; just the pretense
I would consider revising this last line. I think a stronger presention of "stage" would accentuate the line above it; make it more interesting

that the earth is never as permeable as it is this seems a contradiction within a contradiction, that worlds
cannot sink beneath the surface in the blink of an eye:This is a great idea--maybe build on it more before going on
a language we never had any reason to read until now.

2.

Take a breath: you are no longer
in the picture, identified by your family--I think the -- should only be used if you're going to bring it back to end the phrasing. Maybe a comman instead?
and me, living to an old age, dusting
chambers of the heart for your prints,"dusting the chambers of your heart" is a beautiful phrase--which was lost a bit on "your prints". I think you mean "prints" as in fingerprints, metaphorically, but either way this should be adjusted.

telling our stories, an uneven bootleg[/b]Another great phrase!
of memory and mythology, to anyone
who will listen: the River Oaks story,
the Galveston story, the romantic subplot This is one of those "you have to know the story in order to fully understand the meaning of what the heck you are getting to"

[s]in League City that changed our lives ^
forever. Lucky, I think, is a search dog
harking back until a scent is found
again, a boy being pulled from the rubble

after three days, his limbs crushed,
and being carried on a charpoy down a road
cluttered with brick and glass. Lucky
is the sympathetic pain, the guilt of getting away

with stitches and turning to alcohol, breaking
down on the platform before a sea of strangers
coming and going through a row of turnstiles.[/s]
I'm not sure what to make of this little miny plot, but all I know is that it takes away to the beginning, which is good on its own

3.

I expect you to come home
from whatever holds you late.
It's like those moments on the porch

before the heat of summer drove us in--
I'd look up to find a swaying wire
where I thought a bird would be.
#3 is beautiful! The best one ever. Just remember: simple is sometimes best. Bravo!

I don't see how this relates to an earthquake. It's more like an old man's ramblings.

telling our stories, an uneven bootleg
of memory and mythology, to anyone
who will listen: the River Oaks story,
the Galveston story, the romantic subplot

in League City that changed our lives
forever. Lucky, I think, is a search dog

Mmm.

This is one of those sophisticated poems that I can't even digest. It's really good. I understood some of the ideas, but mostly...bleh. It was too hard for me to even distinguish one idea from another, as this poem seemed like, in fact, a chain of interesting, symbolic anecdotes.

The Lucky part was my favorite, though I didn't quite understand it either.

The ending was beautiful.

My suggestion is to condense some of the stories or bits of stories into lines, to simplify the poem a little and make it more understandable.

Otherwise, good job!