≈≈≈
 
Because a bus
at high speed in white space.
Because a Sky Train. Freeway. Autobahn.
Rubber tires whump over asphalt.
 
We think the Strait of Georgia is silent
when really it’s roaring.
 
A barge. A container ship--
blistering furnace from China--
squeezes its hulk
through Seymour Narrows.
Cargo on its way to box stores.
On the deck sky-high cranes,
a dozen semi-trailers.
Blue polyprop rope.
 
Because
a tiny deviation in the ship’s
bank of diesel engines. The slightest
fraction of a degree
                        off course­--
 
                        the steel hull shears
Quadra Island’s bedrock.
 
The only sound above
is waves, shocked and leaping high
up Quadra’s cliffs.
 
But under water a decibel roar
travels its warped, bent path--

≈≈≈
 
 
When the sound hits the tympanic bone, the thin tympanic plate,
when the pressure levels (chronic at 202 dB re1μPa2s) accelerate
as tanker traffic and seismic surveys increase, when ocean basins
reverberate explosions detonated every ten seconds over
months, when shipping traffic doubles each decade,
 
it degrades the underwater acoustics, masks
the low-frequency whale speech,
interferes with echolocation
among the transient orcas
that migrate in late winter
through the southern end
of the Salish Sea for
the return of herring,
the Gulf Islands
thick with tankers
crowding the
already-
crowded
narrows.
 
 
 
Poems from Trailer Park Elegy published in Refugium with permission from Harbour.