Claire Everett

Looking but Not Seeing

Desire paths from there to here and back again, a ritual of tamp and tread born of ancestral habit that is almost as old as the land itself. 

A small, conical pit in the ground beneath your feet, dismissed as nothing until what’s known cannot be otherwise. That a badger’s snout foraging for worms and beetles scruffled in this very spot, nosing the displaced earth to the side, the side, the side, as the creature whose snout it belonged to turned around it, front paws busy like a potter’s hands working the clay as it wheels. 

Then the prints themselves: a broad kidney-shaped pad with five toes, each topped with the scratch of a claw –although sometimes the inner toe, smallest of them all, leaves no trace. 

Wet your palm and pat around the entrance. You’ll swear there is no one inside yet can be sure they caught your scent when you were half a hill away. If your touch proves lucky, the telltale hair is starry-white with a band of black towards the tip. Rolled between finger and thumb there is a faintly discernable judder because the shaft isn’t smooth or rounded as you’d expect. Hold it to the light and you might find it subtly stained with the shades of the soil from which the sett was hewn.

autumn
the pollarded hazel
aflame with new growth  . . .
years of control 
I mistook for love

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About the Author

Claire Everett has served as editor for various journals including Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka, the Red Moon Anthology, Haibun Today, and Skylark. She is a contributing editor for Macqueen’s Quinterly. In her other life, Claire supports adults with learning disabilities, autism, and complex needs, and has worked through the Covid-19 pandemic.