Poetry

The Arkaquah trail

The labourers gone home, the scaffolds bare
and fluttering—evening
piles down, and the scaffolds

stay
while the world falls away. Rags
and rubble-throats, ribways of rhododendron,

veins and spines of the ridge. The walker walks
the bouncing planks, pauses, pulls
from pipe to pipe—

no sense of report, no sense
of return—above an April residue
of blossom and church, among

the squalling sun, the evening snows—
hurrying
like a word toward its tongue.

David Troupes