Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Vista” by Joanne Epp, which was first published in Poetry Pause in May 2020.

---

Vista

By Joanne Epp

An evening walk on unfamiliar ground— 

the surprise of a gravel path, the riddle 

of a blank wall that we follow to its answer 

along a line of elms, rounding a corner into sun. 

Here at a high wire fence the world 

drops away before us. Concrete rumbles 

beneath our shoes. Humped metallic roofs 

of subway trains, done with rush hour 

on the Bloor-Danforth line, slide out 

from under us, navigate switches 

and branching tracks in Greenwood Yard. 

The far end’s a forever away. Broad-backed cars 

loom large beneath us and recede, shrink 

to shining toys, to silver pins, then molecules 

flowing vein to vein toward farthest capillaries. 

With hands clutching chain-links, we don’t find much 

to say, only those rounded syllables 

that always announce the new. 

Not just our son, enchanted 

by all things on rails, but we 

stand awed by all this magnitude 

and muchness, lustre of steel linked 

and stretched to the vanishing point, 

the infinitude of a line. 

---

Copyright © Joanne Epp

Originally appeared in Prairie Fire Vol. 36 no. 1 (Spring 2015). First published in Poetry Pause in May 2020.

Joanne Epp is the author of two full-length poetry collections (Eigenheim, 2015 and Cattail Skyline, 2021) and three chapbooks. She is co-translator, with Sally Ito and Sarah Klassen, of Wonder-Work: Selected Sonnets of Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg (2023). When not writing, she can often be found practicing the organ or photographing wildflowers by the creek. Joanne lives in Winnipeg. Find her at joanneepp.com.

---

Subscribe to Poetry Pause, or support Poetry Pause with a donation today!Browse the Poetry Pause archives

---