Issue 32: Ralph Pite

Tipping

a concrete ramp

up to a mezzanine’s

station of outlets.

heave free from the boot

black dodgy refuse sacks

stalked and sprouting briars –

wrestle and shake them – clear

congested throat

of them – over the side.

cuttings loftily

cascade into a square

of ivy veins and tendrils.

digger like a whale

breaches multicolourful

plastics’ spume-sprawl.

sleeking high-speed

trains sing sharpening

rails’ carving-knife blade.

and spring too

rushes earthscents into

air’s risings

hazy at margins

teetering horizons

and where’s the point you

sense of no return?

The Rainforests of Cornwall

(Zennor)

among the headland’s wild-

fire blackened stalks of gorse

there’s liverwort – bright green,

pentangular, heraldic;

at the door of the mermaid’s

over-wintering cave

a sailcloth of waters

flaps and judders and tears.

*

road widenings

leave meadows on

their sides and soil horizons

standing on end

one still unintegrated

bridge

a trilithon

square to the route

in the periphery

of vision

glare of a passage-grave

                     *

For grieving there is

cause and we

have grounds, indeed

for desperation.

We might learn

to feel compassion

towards our vanished

unwary blitheness,

ought not to refuse

to mourn our mourning.

*

And what, she asks me, might all that be

down there at the foot of the short, steep descent

where the lane we are on meets the B-road

and crosses a stream?

                     *

Ferns: like feathers,

palm-frond fountains,

like épaulettes.

Lichen

 abounding

 overpowering

 every shape and

 hovering

 hint of shape

 in cloud

 is mirrored

 within a cloud

 in reckless

 flamboyant

 camouflage

 or teasing

 as if each

 and any

 body plan

 were no longer

 interfering.

 Lichen: a living

 form like any

 thing and

 nothing else.

                     *

In the beech-trees, where

two principal boughs

part company,

or where a branch has broken off,

different trees – hazel or blackthorn

or holly or rowan –

have taken root.

Ralph Pite has published poems and translations in English and Italian magazines and with the Brodie Press. His teaching at the University of Bristol focusses on ecocritical readings of contemporary and Romantic period poetry, particularly Jorie Graham, Kathleen Jamie, and Coleridge.  He’s finishing a book Robert Frost and Eco-georgic and recently completed a study of Edward Thomas. His biography Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life came out in 2007. 

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