Michael Lithgow
Dogma of spring
The spiders are back. They can’t help themselves,
little legs ticking over my desk. Noticed a web
from my keyboard to a book, a brazen claim. And look,
winged bugs drifting at the window like bits of gauze
in a breeze. It’s all happening again, that queer sorcery
that opens seeds and draws sap to crowns of trees.
If I wasn’t a foundling of science I’d call it desire.
The pessimism of a season teased apart by the easy warmth
of April sunlight. There’s something moving in the sea-belly
of my Love, too; a conjuring of our own. This little snail
turns in wine dark, it hears everything: our breakfast
arguments and the radio news; our bewilderment
and awe. We succumb to the claim this infant makes,
drawing us forward like the dumb passion of a root,
compelled by the centre of things, stone-blind faith.
An irritation (country living no. 2)
When morning sunlight reaches the gentle slope behind my
house, white moths begin to twitch over the brown mulch like
small disheveled blossoms loosed from their stems. November
reams the forest of most living things, so this sudden, gentle
commotion is a surprise. In the sky above the forest is an
untouchable skin of grey. What happens this time of year -
the emptiness - can get on your nerves.
Years ago, I sat wide-eyed facing a sheet of plate glass 16
floors above Pender & Granville watching traffic twitch and
flick through the streets. The wind’s high-pitched moan along
the façade at that height moved inside of me as I sipped from
a tin of beer imagining – rightly – that I would never have
such a view again. Do you know the sound of a skyscraper at
night when the offices are empty? The rewards were real
enough, but I also sensed that I was inside the dull hush of a
catastrophic machine.
The loneliness; that sense of being inside something vast;
watching parts of it unfurl through a window near the start of
a long fall; an emptiness that reaches inside and tries to take
something. I feel it in these hills.
Michael Lithgow’s essays and poetry have appeared in academic and literary journals including the Literary Review of Canada, ARC, Contemporary Verse 2, American Communication Journal, TNQ and Fiddlehead. His first collection of poetry, Waking in the Tree House, was published by Cormorant Books in 2012, and shortlisted for the Quebec Writers Federation First Book Award. Work from this collection was included in the 2012 Best Canadian Poetry in English (Tightrope Books). He currently lives in Edmonton, AB and teaches at Athabasca University.