IN THE LINEAR

Elena Johnson

 

 

 

The train cuts through,
cuts through. Pines 

lift their boughs to the wind,
snags reveal their blackened wood. 

Flashes of birch bark
in the flickering sun. 

What hints remain, remind.

A flock of starlings
near the tracks – 

they startle,
lift suddenly upward.

Alongside
electrical wires 

crisscross, stretch taut,
hang slack. 

Above the wires,
clouds –                                                                                 

suspended
in a pattern of their own.

 

 

 

Elena Johnson is the author of Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra (Gaspereau, 2015), a collection of poems written at a remote ecology research station in the Yukon. Her poetry has been published widely, and has been set to music and performed by choirs in Vancouver and Brooklyn. The French translation of her book, Notes de terrain pour la toundra alpine (tr. Luba Markovskaia), was published in 2021 and won the John Glassco Prize. She works as an editor and writing mentor in Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish territory. She is one of the editors of Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House, 2021).