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From: Vol.07 N.01 – Plant Poetics

Given Trees Their Other Side of Nature

by Peter Larkin

6

 

Stunt to spare surfaces like a local norm, won’t dress the given shadow     let nature’s other side take to the etiolation, its converse universal network until sheer plant filament stretches inclusion to its outright

 

As a fox will fathom a forest from fierce fastenings, as such already within paddings of horizon, exposure to no further insistence     drag-marks haven’t shifted but transfer alliance, motion of what needed to prove it probed

 

 

trees are plants
to the event, other-
flanked without
derision, coastal
where it drains on
infinite distance

ask trees for their
belonging-towards
as birds take off
from leaf before branch,
the immediate quake

 

 

Multiscalar then gusted onto the shell of trees     woodland mesh unruffled by what it doesn’t have (what it hardened) being what it does     stagnant but lignant enough to connect to gift reserve

 

Arboreal disposition (prevalent woodland) doesn’t need to disparage other sides of gift (little grafted as such) since no prime materials are simply for loan

 

8

 

Greennesses facing semi-soluble flow, blanker side tidal only at the roots     while leaves surge up their summit pools, woodland precipice

 

No expense of reserve that couldn’t arise nakedly as world     a leaf garners any counter-slide until naturals by gift breathe their one other side

 

 

pale periphery
in trust of
prominent tree,
one other spring
set back

porously relays
through a
brittle filter its
unlosables,
reducibles

 

 

Trees alive, resolves well past their parkland     only such fugitive bands might have thinned enough     nature’s further side a rail to its adjunct once again

 

Overtaking green with unseen array and hold     nature reserves its lessers for a rarer take which won’t be slighted, the weather-side of gift

 

11

 

A wood’s gone trailing coned from root     unspurned but waiting for its nether face among the post-naturals

 

Riven from trees their nature’s other speed, unhesitant root     where a spinney troops to communion, heavy with not yet ventured calluses

 

 

nature’s rind
lifts off
two-sided
necessities

or a collision
of pine opens
like a cone
missing its
curb

routines of
gift owing
the new hand-
icap of prayer,
lenient to
leaf among the
bending co-
consternations

 

Blurted slipways unbinding but slackening differentially through forest     against such trunkage ontological invasion is double-sanded, root-rubble provided

 

Rucks raggedly across the other side of nature     porous externals in poorer folds deprived of any provisional opposition to gift

Published: March 2020
Peter Larkin

Peter Larkin’s collections of poetry include Trees Before Abstinent Ground (2019), Introgression Latewood (2017), and Give Forest Its Next Portent (2014) . He contributed to The Ground Aslant: an Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry, ed. Harriet Tarlo (2011).

An Australian and international
journal of ecopoetry and ecopoetics.

Plumwood Mountain Journal is created on the unceded lands of the Gadigal and Wangal people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and to elders past, present and future. We also acknowledge all traditional custodians of the lands this journal reaches.

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