___________________
Bark, Archive, Splinter
Bark, archive, splinter
Following pandemics of ink disease and voyages in reverse, can wordhoard be both measure and buffer
In line with fluctuating numbers along critical food chains
Your remit is to forge the full stress of the globe’s lavish adjectives
To get close to the subject. His subject
Like trespassing past headstones towards the willow, the thorn, the poplar, the plane, the oak, the
maple, the linden, the laurel, the holm, the
Absent addressee. Assembling a defence for the organic underneath shade of poisonous yews
This second person must be plural. Fingering its arils, you learn this tree inhibits the decoding of groves
—————————————————————————————————————————graves
After dogged amassment, after magnifying broadcasts, those underground thresholds may have turned
toxic
You are searching for your single artefact
The conversion. To be handled with gloves, to protect against splintering, to communicate. With others
The eye is sometimes borrowed sometimes
Someone else’s pain
___________________
Bark, Archive, Splinter
Bark, archive, splinter
As an order. Not a note
Say your face was bleeding, or that you were always right behind him
Say you were tender-riven out of your limits, or that you lay outwith the reach of his orchardside
—————————————————————————————————————oversight
Say ten hundred infantry vanish in the cover. Of an underpass, or that the dule trees ahead of the
barracks, not knowing what they are yet, not knowing that they are dead yet, they wait to wail, they weep to waste sap, to reverb and recycle lonely parts of speech. Yes
Wake up! Firs, even in the company of fruiting trees, do they know why they lack the flesh that makes
ancient grammar friable
A bed of moss in each foreign territory. Carapace of thrashing tormentil
No sir
Sorry sir
___________________
Bark, Archive, Splinter
Bark, archive, splinter
Making matches
Even if he wanted to be a time-adjourned being
Interrogating desire, annulling chronology
See how erogenous bursts of pollen can sometimes cosplay as zest. You support his moving typography
and chatter
All in on the fantasy of a Great Replanting
He teaches you to transform timber by repeating it slow. Take time by hoarding increments on the lip
A template for pleasure. So that you might scavenge some leaflight
To hear the coeval hum of bees ripen
Vision of a queer tree in the absence of consent. Vapour suns. Abundant renewal
No, really! You can scan the circuitry of the nation’s opened
Morgue: one tongue at rest above the other. An anatomy lesson on how the limit of an understudy
grows in parallel with the limit of playing
Versed in bark, revising under nival brightness
Past a doorway, without rushing, the brittle fringes of pining trees update their software slurry
Statutory symbols and settings: slurred accent of lichen torn by rogue protocol of frost
In the waiting room for the diversity meeting, the forest breathes
He said, reassuringly: Trees are the lungs that compel process
He said, threateningly: Lungs are the trees that compel process
Meanwhile, hunkering down in the scriptorium, you idly daydream about rewiring the engine of the
land’s rubric where, in that lengthy rehearsal, as if the freelance gig was his skull or a tree nut, a gall wasp or a woodcut or a bulwark or some breathwork, you finally
This recipe to make a shared breath last five thousand years
You mark the plot of your life in elaborate red letters
You translate each jingoistic animal call back into common protest
___________________
Bark, Archive, Splinter
Bark, archive, splinter
No discrete points, just a coalition of surfaces and duration
He said, so what is so necessary and urgent about deep time; what runs riot in you is not the tended relation
of herring scales in contact with
Lacking vasculature, dense black moss plagiarises the texture of waterlogged suede, concatenates
amongst networks of lichens and ferns to
Sallowing spike and stair-step as colophons across scabby fir and hemlock
The extant treeline is no line at all, not even a sentence diagram, but functions like a lariat of pinprick
recognition
—————————————————————————————conjugation
He explains that so felled wood will take centuries to decay back into this soil; and that whole slow odyssey
seems to encompass intimate
Like unfolding his quire, warm from your pocket
Warped windward. Flag tree
You admired his mastery of having zero interest in the competition for a fragile beauty
——————————————————————————————————aliveness
Dried moss. Metal watch
The pressure to press on each of your racial icons, and talismans, and cognates, imported seeds which
risk the mimic of brown study
————pleasure
______________________________________________________________________________________________
Jay Gao is a poet and writer from Edinburgh, Scotland, living in New York City. His most recent poetry collection is The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber (Nightboat; Carcanet 2026). His debut collection Imperium (Carcanet 2022) was a winner of the 2023 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, an Eric Gregory Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.