Peter Larkin
Leaves Field Horizon
(From Section 5 of Leaves of Field)
i
In savour of leaves, elective to the range of field, an ipse proffering leaf level shelter beside leaf, lateral in awning but altering axis like the draping shift it is: these are not to be disconfected mere idents. Leaf unfolding queries, they plane out to what can be a pineal planted through it, vertical filter a pinion field of orisons. This is field toleration of emergent dependence, from lateral lap-strings to stirrings of the divings to horizon. How to clad field until it bear the atomic tubes of a tree, by rigifiable stems of spread horizoning the limitless of a field’s bed. The lapse into sensate stalk and branch isn’t entirely joyful, anymore a field is inconsequentially primal: it dares consignment to its burden standing, where a layer one-removed above earth creeps to its lie-flat at horizon, a convergence no longer by field-relation alone. One layer is leaves to another, as one leaf is not another layer, but how the tree of it, bounding at horizon, lies out. Leaf over field in leaf over leaf, the only litter is leaves earning the touch of field. Field from that folding the tactile of earth. Fold broken edge is its additional texture by ligature. The one field (a dia-parity) of unbounded ways to depend, secretions of attachment put some non-ends to the equal of this topic: where field offers to be upheld it proffers at the first origin which dipped between it though not yet lessened into the midst of. Here, from the root outward, comes the narrowest clearing towards horizon. The opening solidly leaks from field’s forgetting it rimmed: not field as itself with no end-sacking but its gauzed taken radiance. Wedged at one tense for another, simply to overintend the between not to fold into it, but as leaf gives it fold. These phases into shaft, plotting the masks of dipshade material, spell long enough for an arraying of spokes in space to shelter time (no one leaf overcoming another but super-mitting the dissension giving field). Leaves weren’t the trees in tips but temporal field of the trees’ overspread, withdraw by season but don’t needle the already flanged bones of winter.
ii
Goes as sheltered as its non-preserve can inhere, a time to crouch horizon’s diving root at foot, bundle that hurdles leaves mapping about the edge. Pinned shirtlets from the same disfold, fluctuating asymmetry in tremors across even-waged leaf. A ripple bodes enhanced border as preparation for under breach (root) not now an outreach: yards to the crossing spell of so much bivalent breadth. Standings of waves risen wrap themselves round any subjacent lamination: let offset particle bite and suck the granule of its adherence. A lattice warrant of ipse scours idem off its blocked scaffold as the inherent lath-lace the former of it is: until all such trees can be what they lie on (once tall with holding up what they lie under). An intra-foliar froth of shelter flaking onto rungs of the wood. Layered turbulence, not piled florescence, of the field’s clipping leaftext (thin client) to prolapsal edge: that leaf-end is scaled a higher pause, a larger offer. Just as screens of origin aren’t skins of shade. Laminae shift because their primaries don’t vertically sift but accompany a lifting out of entrance onto the unopening. Does this curdling of leaf-edge add towards root-patience, though cradling as this is persists hedge in the field array only? The leaves lay long open for the scraper buds of the trees’ simmering origin, a leaving ligature, to field. A ramification broad blade which allows rim divergence to sift in secret. Infra-exudation which isn’t the initial insulator by turns super-foliar, but how leaflets do the film of origin only unscarfing at horizon what holds them hold out to it. The beginning is palisade and spongy tissue, a whole roller-face “leaf, print on life” drooping provisionally on support fieldlessness below. Between air of heaven, and earth in furniture, is layer of leaf, which distends along its fingers suspending hold: what holds it there (earth) not what it gave way to (heaven) and not what it means (field). As horizontals will field horizons to come by foliate, which not being woven veil is means of updraw for vertical concision. By which a field stretches better than it extends.
Peter Larkin works as Philosophy & Literature librarian at Warwick University. From 1988-2002 he ran Prest Roots Press with its commitment to affordable fine press work. He has contributed to Reality Studios, Fragmente, Parataxis, Talisman, Shearsman, Inscape, Angelaki,Stand and The Gig. He appeared in the anthology Ten British Poets (1993). Among his published books are: Enclosures (1983), Pastoral Advert (1989), Scarce Norm Scarcer Mean (1992), Seek Source Bid Sink (1995), Three Conformities of Forest (1997), Landscape with Figures Afield (1998) and Parallels Plantations Apart (1998) A collection of 10 years’ work, Terrain Seed Scarcity, was published by Salt Publications in 2001. Since then he has published Slights Agreeing Trees (2002) and most recently Sprout Near severing Close, What the Surfaces Enclave of Wang Wei, and Rings Resting the Circuit (2004). Recent work has appeared in the Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, Triquarterly, The Fence and Ecopoetics.