[Disrespecting private property]
Bark, archive, splinter
Disrespecting private property
Embargo on couplets
A year without. And to have zero to use against the departed
Lightning throws its hook onto a tree like a digital greeting. A tap and
Dry air turns prismatic. Dissolving acoustic atmosphere from a slack background
Whenever a forest has a shyness to perceive its own form and period
And this is promised too, the unreachable origin
In the span of another night the ground gets even more parenthetical, aerated: elastic ease in the loam post-rainfall
Assurance that the siren of tree frogs is for a later disaster
He had once said: Let’s cut this plastic from the mattress-in-a-box now
With your head on his chest, over his heart, like a jeweller’s loupe
Perhaps we are, ourselves, the threshold
Opening interval. Spalted wood. You said
Listen
For example. Did he not warn you once about a story involving a poultice of wolf lichen, the colour of chartreuse, stuffed in a reindeer carcass alongside powdered glass, fatal to meat-eaters, yes, although never to mice nor rabbits. No, never to mice nor rabbits
Where did that queer powder come from? Perhaps from a vacation ornament you threw onto the floor, or from a medieval delusion of glass which never ended. It spreads itself along every generation
Tonight, the sky seems so afraid of shattering
And you see how the ecology of this model continues exchanging endlessly
Imagine an intimate talking that takes place across an impossibly prolonged time
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You sent him a link to the work of a photographer, who wrote: For one year, I photographed trees within near my house—the goal to create images from the ordinary and mundane
What makes a tree ordinary
Both beyond and near the threshold of one’s human survival
A short poem or a long poem that writes itself forever, an anatomy of suffocating wildness. This pestilential monostich is the perfect vector for
Transpiercing middle ground
Erasing the trees in the space between you and
Perforating this fantasy, an endless mote of a thought still flags and flees; besides, don’t forget those imported chestnuts he once poured into your cupped hands, out of a packet he promised had yet to expire. Each globe radically saturated with strands of ether of white wondrous mould of
HOST NOTES: While writing the episode notes for this episode, I found out quite a bit about this poet, and this project.
The project is actually a poetry pamphlet, designed to be read in landscape mode, and seems to create a sense of discomfort. Learn more about it, and the poet at his site
Bark, Archive, Splinter is an ecopoetic experiment. Inspired, in part, by the commonplace book, by medieval texts, these fragments aim to bring together intimacies of wood, race, desire, via a sylvestral grammar and syntax, via a poetics of grafting.