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Trees the Seed.

An Extract

By PETER LARKIN.

 

HOWEVER BORNE IN leathery shell, was a forever tree-born      fruit of the unenclosed land     oak horn

Nuts that populate booms of tree, once dropped the likely year is mast-prolific:  efficiently consumed or cached buffer the acorn diet or percolate the tannin with ground water

Too heavy for wind dispersal       squirrels and jays gone forward enough to lose their larders     seed dispersal urgents, scatter-hoard it in caches of future mis-heed: retrieval is lost or fed back to its own reversion in oak

One in a million will snout the major way up between early forage  pastes up an immediate miniature leaf

How does an acorn span an oak?      scatterings are post-deferential      an inference of loading scored for its future shades

How does the seed ascend to tree?     how does a tree descend from seed?      how they both pre-offer, re-predict, a participation they never seek        sudden reachables off each obliquity horizon

Seeds beyond beak-size forgot their travels less nutritious, the more they will have sprouted

Fall-off from the parent tree a blunt cup for another range towards the tall life

An acorn springs from its setting out from/by tree, can roll forth the sediment-surges of its link:      one green sack of sessile projectiles

How an oak rig unwraps its mast year by cupping without yet casting         how an armature spread of oak encroaches soil filaments, resumes its transferring best invention

Tree not simply in berry, it cannot be so hurried             or is already in the past of its seed, still its probe, its eventual node

Trees embedded in their own seed thatch        tedded in what severances there are to sheet and rotate, natural ripening with abscission a common large-fruited practice

Immature, empty or unsound, not yet abroad of their poor quality       second fruits are a tree at its perfect delay

Firmness of attachment (the peduncle) is a mother-tree with its own miscellaneous union of seed

Remnant trees maintain their seed dispersal sanction even after forest fragmentation, they are the little of it that is known

A tree is the given in full a seed has to spill, its riven in fuel          is the prior amplification, not replication, of its seed

Leave trees in berry according to their shelterwood thinnings         windfirm enough for a true seed rehearsal

Bird-dispersal ferries new trees into forest as well as without      each seed qualifies a shorter nest, at its curtest distance

The seed mass cares little for forage within range, more for what accidental mishap can do for a change of path         tallness downturn through seed, the drop is rootal

A tree in seed is the gift pleading for its own cluster        primal shutter ahead of every unsown muster       greenery here is solely the unripe, unrobbed seed         the bulk of a tree is its seedful entropy, or its pre-resurrectional embassy

Seedheads are too large a target for trees alone          spawning dispersal while disguising the new offshoots of core sediment        seeds in plumes of tree-failure, so must they reinstall vertical ground


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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