Peter Larkin
from Horizon
At Wall With The Approach Of Trees
Generates abundant horizon off local blindings, how invocationally
sufficient a scarcity it is that horizontals will be the parting of horizontals:
trees play vertical host to the party-intrusions of wall.
Not snap at wall but stay from shock at horizon’s kind of waiting so callably
on the pediment of healed (pruned), unsealed (walled) root.
The surface comes out of its cave by treading up to rim, this ribbon of wall
along which trees are a usable path to the unholed. If well in barrier mode,
a free-walling relay in trees.
Find implicit density by wall and invoke perimeter rather than a yoke of it,
so trees do stop at lure shall be their porches. Desist from onward
contrition, offer it a nesting-blade for imposed edge instead of any clean
creation all the way across the inert expansions of horizonless surface.
Surfaces induced in trees are apt to harbour a wall of endless face steeply
ranged: rim more radically marginal than its overtopping in leaf. Fragile
layer of wall roaming upright in woodlands was, in its right verticals,
understood as no delayer of difference.
Exhibits healing by recognising wall just beyond green thickening, nurture
on the far pledge of its range. Only a barrier’s immoderate well can be that
immediate before the translucent (no transit) greenhall of sending its pales
for horizon.
Trees less like natural wall infill but act their revisions in post at a hindrance
they are vertical enough to align the horizon’s finding for.
Wall hidden ahead only at the trees’ capacity here to know here, but isn’t
itself dwarfed by their greater world middles. This buffer may desire insult
of filament along edge itself, long spiral grouping stubbornly at the missing
midst of, keeping the ontological spares in bunched pieces.
A wall braced by hope just below the branch ceilings, an horizon is nesting
in their being spurned along their way: and counter-traverses do make voice
at ante-turn.
A way of wall in not stanching the beckoning on. Branch pattern answered
by holding it as a pittance bidden, that trees will never abstain from the tall
fare of horizon.
Trees serially in probables of somewhere else, unless chidden to approach
the taunts of immersive edge along waves parted, invoked: wrinkled at a
wall intending (not enacting) horizon.
Standing blocked and redundantly sheltered is more proximate to horizon
days than the abyssal dawning of the open.
This no-opening attributing openness of being is flat impediment which the
high trees’ jammed punctuation cranes straight: they beam direct onto wall
reflex the lean-to dedication of ribbed horizon.
Goes toward/combs forward whatever pinned standing we can: horizon
won’t attend unless the edging not crossing to it is overstocked, consoled in
dense attrition.
Portionless horizon, intimately falls over anti-scape, impediment joins sides
fleet of block, banishing this side-on any corresponding apparatus vanished
heavily otherwise, approaches and trembles the obstruction a foliar earth of.
That the wall of their coming tethers trees on one side of the bad storm-
plains they approached to no such crossing-with, but is ecstatically protected
by them from the onset of horizon’s alterior (outlip) weather.
Trees rarely the most guileless immobiles, all stasis has to go past them but
not faster than they indent. To an observance of wall ahead they do shadow
the untargeted, trenchantly startled of horizon.
A vertical distillation densely whenever that accretion is made thinnest to
wall. Because you won’t enter/traverse these trees they relieve the seam of
horizon: whichever deprivation appeals with submission to call.
Peter Larkin works as a librarian at Warwick University. From 1988-2002 he ran Prest Roots Press. 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 Sprout Near SeveringClose, What the Surfaces Enclave of Wang Wei, and Rings Resting the Circuit (2004). Recent work has appeared in the Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, Triquarterly, Fence Free Verse Jacket and Ecopoetics. A book containing three new texts, Leaves of Field, Open Woods and Moving Woods was published by Shearsman in 2006.