Some Retorting Legends.

By PETER LARKIN. 

A massive vanishing that remnants not finding their displacement haunt the native sacrilege…..until flushes of niche frequent the canopy

Well-confined islands, common colonisers….small stands against no other woodworld….how bark wedges itself onto humanscape

Essential projection if trees are to become ancient….few insistences slower than old trees

Accrued niching at bodged clearances…..an irreplaceable is sapping human speeds

Invasive afforestation, lodge it with pines, engross the uplands….nothing sparse about the correctness offered its pole pressure

Any tree-total upland is tireless, swathed in indurate spoil, horizontal furling, sitka comprehensives

Geometric blots, felled or poisoned for exotic replant…..locust years (yields) leaching the ancient woods….simplest shapes pay on distant funds

Too young for wildwood or semi-ancient remnant, squarely a distinctive teeming?….Are there any late promises for these plants?

Saplings holed-in graduate no forests….busily enmeshed in an unremoved unthrived network

Tree damage itself key stowage for curdling the web, such reinforced threads strung into repointing their breach marks drag an incantation across its ecological ceiling

As emergent trees chip out our repression creases….create a city of their markings as remission of seize

As hedgerow commutes, clump replete, seeking a rate of tree outside the woods….surviving as timber, reviving in pollard serves (calls at) what is no longer husbanded

stitched by us, patched by nature….tab-edges between the farmed slabs:…however a woodful additive, befits shelter

cracks and edgelands a justified elsewhere, filtering in the midst of….dilating like for like

Homicidal air locks onto trees, at net weight of carbon….strict riddance of forest in blossoming streetly aside

Block planting at its default position.…equity is most of the least, ensuing scarce verticals….farming tree as public good/s urban forest retrofit

As the generic cellulose factory speaks cheap land, locality deficit, less a neighbourhood than its own notionals

Then to scatter a copse at its join-ups, the more social its scarcities, the more frond-like its secretions

The empty song-shock of not encountering a tree….forest echoes follow the flatter rumble of baffled townscape

Life isn’t muted enough to faint before all its details, leaf-lendings, edge-plummets

A quotient of symbols as altered image, the danger-range of emphatic statics

Hint of oak roof is marking with suburban spraint, there was always sufficient hutting until the wooden became its own excess structures

No rougher supertide than a surface’s reverie of buried conservation, striating its dust……..live chainsaw culture climbing trees, an impactive speckling of species

Walk a grove through a welter of woodland….where arrivals are monitored and wrapped…………newly aproned into extension

Play wild lime where it stood….a scarred towards, a lesser as at last forewarned

Stunted, instantiated, post-solo stress redolent of trees at rest

Expressive forest at the toe of ancient tree….a tumble of assent, assignation, reception, within a single throw

Pervaded (circuited) before any surface annunciation, the eruption event then has no need to break out for cover

What is the character that enters a wood as that wood’s own unsown persona?…….then ranged, assailed, at every available tree-height

Take a cut from forests flourishing?….the languishing clearfell furniture…until the woods fulfil different weeds

Buffeting and sinking woods where graspable….to relieve their core interior, rebestow their corridor files

What else might haunt trees other than our epic scale?…as forest sores to carbon stores

Grown as if (to be) last, it escapades its own exhaustion

a sap of all surges at the stripped bark

With grateful acknowledgement to Robin Walter, Living With Trees (Little Toller Books, 2020)

♦

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 University (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, and Sounds Between Trees was published in 2022 by Guillemot Press.