Peter Larkin
Trees Feral for Light, 4-7
Habits of light what a tree wears on its steepness,
rim-paradable glades of inclination, infinitely
slow oscillation
A flicker of limbs lit across a land’s long
graze, scraped pasture invites a nondescript tree
wilding its own before the barest light
to launch into light
to scold a leaf
with all the links,
not stop short
but gaze
(gate it) tall
what are the
spares of light?
radiant gauges’
upper gameplay?
where are the attestive
paucities? A tree
is full light unsated,
heavily fated
entire forest task
How can these horny beacons, given to
stabbing, affix, inflict themselves
with light?
Light-demanders are not sun-commoners,
spell out their summits along
minor probes of gift
The culture (tree variable verticals) of light
is central querk no less an array of transitions,
estrangements, intimacies
A tree’s splenetic propensity to rapture
as much light as possible a gene’s sheer
completion in light/shade ratios still a
rocked frame
elective light sits
for the nearest
tree mosaic
of spectral environs,
not laying rays
between but at
the bunches of
detection
photon transport
across hybrid
inception trends
towards a highly
ridged attraction
any cradled
summit must
spring from
a quit foremost
Self-casting onto relations of light even before
it has a costing of shadow and root feral
negotiation through shields and welters
What dances in brief light a slewed life? trees no longer
random once thumbed through for alcoves of
concentric dazzle
Light spoils no two trees alike,
they assemble each other’s near-extinction
radiance then see how the spires are
extreme formal residue
strictly residing
Post-determined by an invariance of light
in movement only vicinity subsides into
retaining the divagations sculpting indirect
(vertical) desire
assume a tree
once a
day learning
its profile
close enough
to light to
truncate its
secret, all forest
initially soft
on target
falling onto a
cadence which
creases with the
tempo of light
Light gives no reprieve from feral engineering,
a calculus of macular response, patchwork
of architecture in feed
The same sun is good for branch-mien and extended
leaf release
Upper growth doesn’t follow lighting a probe, a negative
geotrope pulls dire sky, fans another radical field-glow
along the vertical lane
A tree sender delivers high, then locks onto
fallow light, slender constancies
of atmosphere
what offers its
own salience,
bewilderment of
outcrop once
dressed, lifted
from intense
coruscation
old-fault trees
steeped in feral
contention, they
repack a dappled
plight of myriad
material
solar residue
micro-settled
sifts an energy
decorum, the
geospatial taunt
If I could detect the veering of a bough off
a brow of light twig behaviour nothing
of a filter, but brushes towards such
a post-clamouring
If stalling northwards an upward heaven, southerly
horizontals pitch a gantry off diagonal
alighting
Peter Larkin‘s previous collections include Lessways Least Scarce Among (2012), and Give Forest Its Next Portent (2014). He contributed to The Ground Aslant: an Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry, ed. Harriet Tarlo (2011). City Trappings (Housing Heath or Wood) was published in 2016 and Introgression Latewood in late 2017. A symposium on his work was held at Warwick University (UK) in 2018, the proceedings of which will appear in the Journal of British & Irish Innovative Poetry.