© 2014 by Joanne Epp

Joanne Epp's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Light Ekphrastic, Rhubarb, The New Quarterly, and The Dalhousie Review, and in the anthology Tongue Screws and Testimonies. She lives in Winnipeg with her husband and two sons. On sunny winter days she loves to skate on the river.

“Grid Road” first appeared in Joanne's first chapbook, Crossings.

Web site: joanneepp.com

Grid Road

Canola fields pungent through rolled-down windows.
Our gaze drawn along the fence lines.

How to tell oats from barley.
How all grasses generate waves of light,

how one square follows another, but water interrupts.
The heron lifts off just slowly enough to show

how the blue layered on blue, the green
that follows green, are not the same.

So much space between the planted rows.
An unknown universe in that pond.

How far can we follow the blue wing-beats?
Does the sequence of fields ever repeat?