Issue 15: Peter Larkin
City Trappings: Housing Heath or Wood: 5
Rooted ahead of brick-
range and seedlessly
quick a dismaze of
slacks on tinted surfaces,
urban glow alone with its
subduables a heath
glistens unfoundational
at wider drainage skirts
laminated poverty out-
positions ground, amenity
flanks its heaths
by keeping them bare
what is soil for genetic
distance? unwieldly
gorse, how nearly we
liken you to raiment
filters the toll of
immensity, a podsol
soil awarded its
heath housing
for component rurals to
surpass city is to be
uncompactly overtaken:
bird-stained transects
across a saved (neutral
natural) space, walks
the replication
a filament of commission
balanced between heath
and wood bidden abysses
signal a tissue
in latent cup
iterate the bout until
intervention traps it, so
naturalise planning sprawl:
now heath and wood
can wrestle their
paper-thin recalcitrance
6
Hints at a lighter
furthering, the wood
takes longer for being
screened, on hand to
its passer-penetrants
within the trap coppice
is loose closet, nothing
detaining its host
gateways requiring
animate leaf, cages
against tree-felling
strap major revival
quantifications
flattens the swivel
enshrining, two different
sparsities but common
preserve: tree-wreckage
can only be short-term
holes gather in woods
down an unisolated:
each agglomerates
in/out via stockades
of relapse, absolute
access apparel
uptoned forest in bad
resurrection wholly
arrived on summits
beyond survival:
leaves fail, never
sinking they will
express nature noise,
oak-thuds of belonging
sound a boom
of complicit bud
provision is in frame
to closable hangings:
these oak-elbows
are structural agreement,
restore trapped landscapes
onto a ceiling
threatens to impute tree-
limbs left to themselves:
the city still daren’t risk
amputation in withdrawing
7
Near /far table the city’s horizontal application, adjacency is filtered a short step to resistance, taps into the reluctance of repose / no more landscape than is cultivated fresh to immoderate stasis / kempt beyond bounds of the frame, turbulent sames offer similar thick stances to a counter-alien, a city’s interlinked amendments within the vitalities available / mapped onto unnakedness, unable to delve its furniture hinterland and divest it / clumps conjoined discrete, separable results postponing an already inhabited outer side / a certain kindness of endless, unfree quotience, city mobility self-axles, swerves (dismargined) once abroad / the fixation taught to unstifle, relief landscape overstipulates / the belief-entity has no other retrieval, at some point the trapping was always adventured / backwash within ladings of pristine crews of arrival / staying for a world traps it out prayerfully, no other country path is so bulk-advanceable / adhesion itself is scarcities occurred, as witness was not the release / resist in a stale vantage infinite location / is to be perceived where a heath stultifies horizon before any other nearest neighbour / this is woodland breathing it out, unripped, thanks an indwelling’s condensation / a circlet of currents merely the arena-tufts of heath, deferent squatness makes it to template, is anti-absorbent / the trap impinges, purchases what surpasses itself being, deducible through-pressings offer paysage / mendful at an infective spate, arrested location reprints tautness on horizon / not this trapping but something co-pliantly impressed upon it / onto-retentives waiting on fallow captives / are we trapped out of relation or is this the growing tip of primordial fixation, horizon’s mainstream? / is our self-suffocation the peak of a stratum composing thickly, givenness itself risking every compromised between? / to complete the here-somatics of belonging, whole nearnesses given zones, multiple actants immediately alongside / compaction proffers a nearside ontological stab, such embedding hoards its own pleats’ inclusive shedding / hyper-objects downsize our temporality, can’t be strained off fixations of non-betrayal, staying underlong in the gift that so out-traps us / firm slipways at blockage exposition / a green gap is a gate to walking the entrapment / saturation rule at any flood of experience / unrenowns of environmental range, encirclement lives its space eliding the capture / the many of us with a shared booth of origin / at the universal part (park) of the day’s irreplaceables / planetary greenframe deduced by urban sift, inheres in prime surrounder the bare city seed / primordial is punched onto ground, a city needs only the lightest obstruction to reroot / that nature is for fencing can only be antecedent if we arrive gripped alongside it / horizon now on captive point, through which the offer was opened / at last relational about foreshortening however cramped across the earth’s renderability / there is no further net of bestowing, the city is propped at wedges around which it can’t stop, has already conceded what it never started / trapped but abridged, a diacritical crust of curtailment, it chooses to cruise the remainder / nature is concise extract-human over all the world, the city conspires protection under its feet / initial urban running ahead into the domain, final urban of displaying, not laying, the trap / can the city position redemption to a para-release? / where would it leave its sanctions of reconstitution, the purely surroundable?
Peter Larkin is the author of a number of poetry collections, including Lessways Least Scarce Among (Shearsman, 2012) and Give Forest Its Next Portent (Shearsman, 2014). Veer Books will publish City Trappingsin 2016.
