Harriet Tarlo
from CUT FLOWERS
turn down volume b4 playing
memory ear loads heard
siskins willow warblers
goldfinches mainly. Loki move over
ghosts convalescent suns
let’s gunnera grim as
call it gothic
a flourish
tree handles we hold or pleach in
turn dieback, the blood never
forsook the rose and the lintie
o shredding ourselves into parts of
others communion contagion
ashes into avenue or tunnel
un right at the tips, just
touching
stood outside the house one last time
she leaned her back against a thorn
just some arrangements, which you
can have then then yes then child
labelled later, later, much later
a leaf out of your greenwood
still book, no leaves
left
coots, when they're very young, they can't
cross over wide water, the water
it's wide years are places now
my mother said it was the dregs of
music welcome welcome fish
in the flood, draw it mild
deep and meaningless
down
I leaned my back against an oak
labouring lark in weak rain, bright
sun lined with the things you
don't show, dig out dart
welcome bird in the wood
nought wrong with roses
first it bent and then it
broke
can't see or decode most of them
icons give it a shove
touch less where you can
cough into your elbow
swipe right, hand tearing
right on the one you want
squiddling from one foot to the
other
this whole structure came down but
slowly dust first, still hanging
on falling then line by line or
frames loosening from walls
built around a pole or
poem strut back beyond
trunk into smothering life
alive-oh
I don’t really feel like this now. Love is
nor is it an invitation to edit
secret tools laid out flat out
square by square in wooden
boxes that fail to break open
each waking remembers the one
before wide wings flying right
at you
turn down volume b4 playing
memory ear loads heard
siskins willow warblers
goldfinches mainly. Loki move over
ghosts convalescent suns
let’s gunnera grim as
call it gothic
a flourish
tree handles we hold or pleach in
turn dieback, the blood never
forsook the rose and the lintie
o shredding ourselves into parts of
others communion contagion
ashes into avenue or tunnel
un right at the tips, just
touching
stood outside the house one last time
she leaned her back against a thorn
just some arrangements, which you
can have then then yes then child
labelled later, later, much later
a leaf out of your greenwood
still book, no leaves
left
coots, when they're very young, they can't
cross over wide water, the water
it's wide years are places now
my mother said it was the dregs of
music welcome welcome fish
in the flood, draw it mild
deep and meaningless
down
I leaned my back against an oak
labouring lark in weak rain, bright
sun lined with the things you
don't show, dig out dart
welcome bird in the wood
nought wrong with roses
first it bent and then it
broke
can't see or decode most of them
icons give it a shove
touch less where you can
cough into your elbow
swipe right, hand tearing
right on the one you want
squiddling from one foot to the
other
this whole structure came down but
slowly dust first, still hanging
on falling then line by line or
frames loosening from walls
built around a pole or
poem strut back beyond
trunk into smothering life
alive-oh
I don’t really feel like this now. Love is
nor is it an invitation to edit
secret tools laid out flat out
square by square in wooden
boxes that fail to break open
each waking remembers the one
before wide wings flying right
at you
© Copyright Harriet Tarlo 2021
Harriet Tarlo’s single author poetry publications are with Shearsman Press and Etruscan books and her artists’ books with Judith Tucker are with Wild Pansy Press. She is editor of The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (2011) and special features on ecopoetics for How2 and Plumwood Mountain. Her first volume of Cut Flowers is out with Guillemot Press in 2021. She is professor of ecopoetry and poetics at Sheffield Hallam University.