POETRY: CORNELIA HOOGLAND

WATERY HIGHWAYS HOME
 
Roll down the car window –
the song
of the winter wren.
 
The world’s sorrow
is fathoms deep,
is undertow –
 
it shapes the darkness
that contains us.
 
What kind of broken are we?
 
           This winking
           branch-to-branch
 
releases into light
above the trees.
 
Is it wind
passing through
fir needles?
 
What is sound
when nothing
resists it?
 
Deafening:  
container ships,
cruise liners,
screaming invasion,
sonars, seismic
air guns detonating
shock waves of noise –
obliterating
 
subaquatic clan-sounds,
a babbling calf
trailing its mother’s
four-click morse-
code, the audio glue
of pods on the move,
on watery highways
home. A wonder
one orca
can hear another.            
 
                           Where are you?
 
Where are you?
 

Cornelia Hoogland’s forthcoming chapbook, titled Dressed in Only a Cardigan, She Picks Up Her Tracks in the Snow, is forthcoming with Baseline Press (2021). Her latest book is Cosmic Bowling (Guernica, 2020), a collaboration with the visual artist Ted Goodden. Trailer Park Elegy and Woods Wolf Girl were finalists for national awards. Hoogland was the 2019 writer-in-residence for the Al Purdy A-Frame and the Whistler Festival. http://www.corneliahoogland.com/