Robert Cording: Ghost Forest

Humpback Whale


I never saw the whale, yet cannot remove it
from my sight. In the story I read, it was evening,
the day had settled. A biologist, who was notified
of the beached whale, moves towards
the darkening outline of its startling enormity.

The whale is not just dead. Someone has
hacked off its flukes. Someone thought it would be
funny to stuff a cigar butt in its blowhole.
And there’s a heart with a couple’s initials
carved into its barnacled flanks to declare their love.

Sometimes I pretend I am that man walking
the length of the whale to measure what was.
And sometimes I remember the humpback breaching
near my grandfather’s boat on Long Island Sound,
the sound its fifty-foot body made as it slapped

down against the water over and over,
and the splash it sent up like I did as a child
discovering the play of my body. But mostly I think
of how the biologist must have known there is
no refuge from the unbearable he must bear home.

~~~


Ghost Forest, Marco Island, Florida


Some said it was a once-in-a century storm,
others the new normal of global warming,
but Ian’s fifteen-foot surge struck
the final blow after years of flooding,
the full moon high tides of rising sea levels
bringing the first deposits of salt into the forest.
Now, their roots blackened, the trees
bleached-out, the forest is nothing more
than gray pillars or skeletal trunks with branches
thrown up like arms in desperation
when people drown. A forest of memory,
the trees are apparitions when the moon
haunts the ghostly ruins at night.
When I take my grandchildren to see it,
they ask, What happened here? My answer is
not an answer: sometimes people don’t believe
what is taking place even when they can see it
with their own eyes. Tonight, I’m not here
to pretend this place that has been lost,
can be saved, but simply to stand here,
at the edge of what once was
and remember the sound of wind in the pines—
not that ocean sound, but something thinner,
quieter, older, ancestral whispers moving
through the spikey tops of the trees.
Or how, looking into a darkness
I could not penetrate, I’d see glowing eyes
and flitting shadows and hear sounds
I could not identify, though I could sense
how much life was going on beyond me.

~~~~

Poems copyright 2026 Robert Cording

Robert Cording’s many poetry collections include In the Unwalled City and Finding the World’s Fullness, both published by Slant Books.