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
What stunts at the figures of juicy trees, a sap of all surges at the stripped bark
Compact browsing forever ankle-high, a taste of arrested development, perpetual self-identical renewal, surrender of the reach
Tender green argues specific pasts, tests (grains) the subtler proofs
if any web of causation stands to every least consequence
A barrage of stress, that it rubs out puckers of instress, knotty intrication not yet couplings, underseam ripples
Leave at its loneness how hollow trunk synchronises with stag head
woods continue their cycle on the most difficult ground
There is an increment how trees are put by for a decade, a quota of anterior consideration, narrative of a rerooting at loss
Not every wood needs a great habitat industry dense and dark may shed some diversity but go pastoral at the edges of asperity
The worn scrub its own exhaust against super-use turbulent garb
Proforest, entire sports of tree initiative
instinctive gaps, continuous interlude: or implanted tree would already be on its damage slant
Silvo-arable, silvo-pastoral, alley-cropping beside browsing blocks ahead of the retro-planted, its surrounding seed sources
At a stitch of tree entwine the shoots of local faction, itself a decompaction
Landscape services redesired, as recompiled under unequivalent trees
Closest vent at the tree-closet, its breathed leaf at more than singles
attributed particles it signals
Expand if it thins
more diverse onto its adjacencies, distinctive assemblages, these effigies invoke a healing parody, prayer-rooms of nested induction
for the urging climate, aspen, oak, hornbeam, lime
Peter Larkin contributed to The Ground Aslant: an Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry, ed. Harriet Tarlo (2011). A symposium on his work was held at Warwick University (UK) in 2018, the proceedings of which appeared in the Journal of British & Irish Innovative Poetry. Among recent collections are Trees Before Abstinent Ground (2019) and Encroach to Resume (2021). A set of 100 two- to three-line poems, Sounds Between Trees appeared in 2022 from Guillemot Press. His newest collection is If Trees Allay an Earth Retrialling (Shearsman, 2023).
P.Larkin.1@warwick.ac.uk