Peter Larkin - Stone Forest, 4

Fossil Forest at Lulworth Cove by Marilyn Lowe

Algae cushions sit that button-hole, as if blind puncture were put to the punches of how flushed-out trees point an undiffraction: pulled limbs are now paws in stone, clawlessly rasping at nest. Bone beds due vertical root-fealty pulverize hollows of shaft in accretive rock. Given such shallow knolls free of primordial root-jam, this contusion of absence is for priming sedimentary verticals and launching forward the stopped burrows of secondary support.



Forest itself a string
lacking interval, final
incursion of the stone
of belonging





Banked in mound, absence has no runway except in scarcity of scoured relief, an incubation pillow refers presence: how loss scooped at a cumulus of instrumentally yoked abandonments. Spongy dependence went rigid at this incorporate latter bowl, whose parafidelity won’t quit defeat-treads retrapping the sieves of site.



Mounds of record
like a nascent super-
structure ramp the
desiderables of scarce
counter-sift





Free salt swimmings sapped trunk and then baste in wrap mouths of ruinables cast onto enduring particulars of the non-negotiation. Sustain a stripping from site, deep structure calls for no strapping in the empty bowl. So forest, once fossilized, was never a gallery of conversion but a witness traversing preventions with all retention intact but disappeared.



Towers of spongiform
bone spin what vacates
in socket along the
zero held association





Tufa formation mounding unique to tree-crown like some modern jacket of the groin: this collar repeats from stock the hollow callus where a tree loses its own branch. The re-pleat snakes the leaves off forest cover with trans-offerable precision, or same ground blames for its badges of lesion. Not cemented to base but folded for inland edge of breach, the primal trunk insertion: hollow sump encombs a ground filling with horizon.



A petrifying spring
of forest absorption,
in saline paces go
integral inscriptors:
occupy strata out of
posts vertical with
reguiding the absence





Algae by the colonial unit courted by trunks soon to be grounded in brine. As secondary mould the rampart is outclan. Defeat primaries took for their reproof any arisen subsidence sounding a razed rod-zone, what phantom spires sitefully elate. How the hollow sockets, sensing open bowl, conjugate the travelling root-sendings of perforate surround.



Algal in mat will
wind tree-fatings
through the suck
of wild tunnels

of attachment:
never hollow enough
socket if it lack
swirl of a place’s
choppy festoons
of prehension

though root is barrier-
pierced tufa goes carrier-
hipped: lifts with
empty fore-cages
to an horizon
its overwhelming

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Peter Larkin is Philosophy & Literature Librarian at Warwick University, with research interests in ecocriticism and in postmodern theology. His recent collections include Leaves of Field (Shearsman, 2006) and Terrain Seed Scarcity (Salt, 2001).