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As Grass Will Amend (Intend) Its Surfaces.

An Extract.

By PETER LARKIN.

 

UNDISCARDED TREES’ REDUCED travel is here a counter-respite     low-level savanna trills with new corridor room through the dispersals     grasses of earth-time filmy loan    roofless but coated     every veining is blunt-browsed over a skimmer for soils

a green wreath (waist) for unladen bare sediments, all detriment included     lining what has already been turned out of itself, from dust to plant-grist, surface gust      a dust-bed given one more surface       unmowable by the earth itself, awaits extenuation

grassings of an interior desertion    micro-stems where structural roots have been withdrawn      what is the browsing line to trees is hoof-opportunity for meadows, treads it abrasional dell, a measure of seed-craters

non-violent (unsilent) in woodland     nonchalant grass cresting its own escape-vessels     a rustling meadow is an unpegged tent      a membrane between earth and pain      grass worn to the earth’s usury, delayed return, inflated meadow-mix

earth mown for its future fissures but shown a universal unshorn sweeping the encrusted grid     fresh-bled fastenings      no gash extremity is sure of tapering the tips      grass links against terrestrial blanks     not yet bearded but desert-dirt coded

foxtail nodding fulvous, stays wagging the field, less brush-down for reluctant terrains           couch grass tongues the soil, twitches its stolons, sponges the air with seed    how do grasses echo across other grazed masses, their shake summits?

a patchwork greening alone, wind-sown reactors     crushes to nearest sheen beneath sky, no other earth between its own visibility jacket     low in simulation of sheath-protection    however candidly the earth is shorn, it crackles with roots shorted      grass circuits are born and again born, then seed-flown

early grass, the same to heal forest hesitation      new grass in translation but won’t evade the many bare stages of previous passing remission     keen modern grass in pledges of lately earth, one rawness among many    now at its post-anonymous trans-intimates

to pull a landscape’s compass out of its mowing gear but with penetrable veering      an act of grass unbungs allowing superscrapes carelessly over    basal growth out-manoeuvres the clotted hinge      clenched grass at the twitch of a parapet, shakily steers horizon     strings in tuft with no such soil parallels, uncontained deflection, reaps bold


Peter Larkin contributed to The Ground Aslant: an Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (2011). Among his more recent poetry collections are City Trappings (Housing Heath or Wood) (2016) and Introgression Latewood (2017). A symposium on his work was held at Warwick U (UK) in 2018, the proceedings to appear in the Journal of British & Irish Innovative Poetry. A new collection, Trees Before Abstinent Ground was published in late 2019.

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