Issue 10: Peter Larkin

Sparse Reach Stretches the Field, 2

Wood lightens the thumbs about its thickets and there goes attachable breeze within it, begs a draught of the narrows whose paleness of apex is preliminary baulked limb, what bridges the currents of field

Wooding in no bitterness over sparsity of stretch, encounter of reach to be in the brittle what was not in the leaves but the attribution of their micro-rigidities

Sinews and roots threadbare but stretch their shower of limb for the intertwining, embeddings at unsealed protective paces, a scarce spurt to the pleated surfaces of emergent leaf at foot of field

Stretch them the cost of relation, across a post-abundant array throwing on its cusp further offerable compensation such as the field is starved enough to publish

Tree spindles capped in consultation but at a passage of baggy wind-frappage, from lines of poverty they trail the heeded knocks off wipes of land

The fir’s frame is not to be divided from its compression-abject of fit, the leaves it forsakes to stretch a tree

Poorly multiplying its fronts tauter than implication, additional reach in the availing distribution we knew from no appliances but field

Branches not strained but reached against their stay, that harrowings accompany these framed clumps by not impairing their boxed (travelled) curvature

A corrosion of trees outside their blained element, stretching the portent of scarcity’s arena, unvexed by the scant asymmetries, green-tied sieves

World without fail but lacks contractile weather to set out the stalling except it leach to the blunts of it, racking this corridor until the street is active separation of trees formed along its continuous unravelled succession

Greenstick apertures, tipped aptitude until any branchless leaf has freckled it before the hoof of field

Stringent sober stem pitched rigid to what is not lean trim but its granted to remain, foreshortens the grain but voids its own mal-position, deficit of woodland quieting the buffetings of transmitting it taut

Skidded but exact within gaps across the transitional erosion suffering zonal spread, skinnable interface gone green in wrong cage-adjacencies but the same arc a sliver of horizon frets off such bulbous silt entrenched on righted branch

Sliding through field its cocoon impact, sides of compressed body a decoy of pine, each misstep a majority leap between trees, the compass of root brandishes field minus liminal envelopment

a taut deck once

tapped by lean root

reaches joint to capsule

scant protection

huddles abroad, this

is what is press-

ing for transit

Reticence of survival aboard resistance crosscrossing shrunken entireties of the extent, walks a transect line confined to elongated, counter-corridored nurture

A stretched cord of dumped tree theoretically spent on gravity but actively regroups across this uncoveting of field, by common crouch a marginal obsession there is in the grudge elasticating rebestowal

Whose lateral compression was no decomposable, the tree skirt is bloated but toned to the lightness of its after-scape, shares the gradients of littered illumination across field

Brawny knee onto the bar of wood selects trees by no convenient distance, these fibres stun it home, field it with pellets of crust the matter of globules on branch, rewrought fieldward by serpentine (uncrabbed) damage

Such cramped latticing becomes amenably less than its own crumple-zone, readier than transmission for an attenuation pressing for field

What is given does flatness on field off compaction of branch minimals, where there is more absorption than can wrap there is still no relapsing from stretch: fit trees to their field-mark once limbs hatch the reach

Willowy break from stub onto slips sparsely sub-branched, then stiffened alongside any slenderness accompanying the unfuelled full extent, too much to indwell, only a symptom stem of what is offered

Leaping greenly, no split of tree but its scant clannishness, devisiting but undistending the intimacy of field toward its shortspan of cover

Peter Larkin’s three collections of poetry are Terrain Seed Scarcity (2001), Leaves of Field (2006), and Lessways Least Scarce Among (2012). He contributed to The Ground Aslant: an Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (2011) and published a book of academic essays, Wordsworth & Coleridge: Promising Losses in 2012.  A new collection, Give Forest Its Next Portent, is due out in 2014

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