The Cougar

Barrhead, Alberta

That winter, we found its careful tracks

set down in noiseless, deliberate span

beyond the fall of light from the cabin door,

the nimbus of all we circumscribed as ours.


Something keen about those spreading prints,

an excised gravitas in November snow,

not pressing bounds, but simply skeined

out past the visible, where all things lower


and vanish when the dusk comes frosting in.

It’s a basic truth: we’re nature-bound

to step from the path when the path is fair

for no other reason than the fact we doubt


what we’ve always known: that something’s there

past the paralyzing edges of the safe and right.

There’s something wilder unhinged in darkness:

the cougar like the limber spine of night.


And the summer turns, and it dogs us still,

though the muskeg dries and refuses tracks.

There’s a certain circling in these northern woods,

and the silence of the frogs is, itself, address.


When the cougar comes, that breathless weight

is the nighttime tearing; unwieldy, thin.

Not the din of frogs or the slough birds’ chuckle,

but the exhale of winter on our June-damp skin.

© Copyright, 2015, Jenna Butler.
All Rights Reserved.