April field by gillian harding-russell

January 12, 2022

Poem name: April field Poet name: gillian harding russell Poem begins: Your paw prints in the dried mud at the corner of the field where we would walk, big as a cougar someone remarked of your ample foot marks and so now I follow their trail following a scent from several days past, stale and gone like the light we receive from stars that have pulsated years before it reaches us and so I remember the deer skull you lighted upon in June a year ago, daisies threading their recent lives through nooks of eyes and jaw and now I cannot get out of my head your princely silhouette against the wind, nose uplifted to catch heady scents in this April air following the thread of a particular skein unwinding its trail through the dead grasses – all that intricacy of message and language I lack the olfactory sense to read and find myself catching an otherworldly glimpse of your familiar shape, tan fur patches of sunshine in darkness behind the scrub bushes, still bare, out the corner of my eye – and the possibility you might watch me as the ghost of the scent might become aware of the one fast on its trail? End of Poem. Credits: Copyright © gillian harding-russell Previously published in The Society vol. 17 (2020). gillian harding-russell has five poetry collections published, most recently Uninterrupted (Ekstasis Editions, 2020), and a short chapbook Megrim (The Alfred Gustav, 2021). Her previous collection In Another Air (Radiant Press, 2018) was shortlisted for a City of Regina Award. Her poems have been short-listed three times for Exile’s Gwendolyn MacEwen chapbook competition, and in 2016 won first place for the sequence Making Sense. gillianharding-russell.ca