Ostrom’s “Quake” contrasts birds, which sense the coming shift and escape into the air, with humans, who trust their “immense, inappropriate structures” and their own importance. The speaker imagines Earth not as stable ground but as something always in motion, thinking, shrugging, passing under our feet “in squirts and waves.” That makes the earthquake less a rare disaster than an exposure of a truth we usually ignore: solid ground is a comforting story, while our actual material condition is unstable, even liquid or empty.
The mood is wry and unsettling, not panicked. There is humility in the line “that is that” — a recognition that the planet is already moving through space and we are riding it, small and fragile, no matter how solid our buildings feel. It leaves the reader aware of how much we rely on a myth of permanence.