folio : Forty-five Ottawa poets
The rot under the tree
Dragging last autumn’s
dry grey leaves
from their almost resting
place under the apple tree
I panicked. Raking is
hilarious (to trees
and everything else), but
I was excited to imagine
this endless engine of
debris as my enemy.
Who makes enemies of
apple trees?
In horror, I threw down
my rake and ran to Costco
to buy new tires.
Watching the swarm of our bodies
at the food counter made
me think about
what we’re doing, here --
you know,
not in the moments of
fervour that sometimes gush
like highlights of a
career, or falling in love,
the kick that throws us
to the curb or churns a poem,
our pleas and moments of
rage; but rather,
everything else: eating,
waiting, gathering, playing
uncertain roles in the
stories we find ourselves in.
Every so often finding a
way out of the box,
poking a finger into the
maw of god
whether she’s a slug or
some certain sensation
in my cerebral cortex.
The finger goes in
and I am eaten suddenly,
unexpectedly, fantastically.
Whimsically. A difficult
thread to hold, the rot erupting
abruptly like gold, like
lasers in the night, like beauty
on a public bus. Like the
bottom of a box of old papers
in a basement rotted from
unwanted water.
We’re all buried there.
The smell of the old leaves.
A spring reunion.
Anthropocene
I
cut my finger on an open edge of tin once,
the
thin boundary holding in the din of blood
opened,
a slippery undoing of my performance
as
a solid bit of history. And then I walked
on
a shoreline, trees still dull grey in spring
awakening
and the ground brown and mostly
dry
underfoot. A scuffle of animal prints in the mud
caught
my eye, scratched patterns in the dirt
like
herringbone, and amid the ruction of lines
the
imprint of a predator cat, paws big as a fist.
I
wondered how far the cat’s necessary expertise
in
sudden death was from the mud on my shoes.
The
Anthropocene – that’s the smell of this poem –
in
the memory, now, of breeze blowing
at
my back in that mostly wild place, the sense
of
my own footprints as all I will ever see,
or
what I can’t like a fish never knowing water
until
ripped out on a hook. That cat’s hand in mud
feels
like a hook pulling me deeper into a web
of
predators’ earth, pulling me forward
into
sunlight I swear that seems to squeak as it passes
through
the late morning air. I’m rushing,
now,
but I won’t show my dread to just anyone.
My
blood is escaping certainties through my fingers.
This
place knows itself without me, which seems obvious.
But I am still here.
Disappearing.
Michael Lithgow’s poetry, essays and short stories have appeared in Canadian and international journals including TNQ, Literary Review of Canada, The Brussels Review, Canadian Literature, Topia and Fiddlehead. His second collection of poetry was published in 2021, by Cormorant Books. He teaches at Athabasca University.
