Pass the Lukewarm Forest
sheer
anti-establishment
trees
I witnessed the one cut down
the gap
in the grainy curtains
if it can only be this warm
make it colder and less shady
park benchmarks of experience
I think I radiate
because I used to live elsewhere
About this poem
This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2017. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2017 was Roddy Woomble.
Author’s note:
Somewhere I got hooked on the almost-word “anti-“, and started overusing it. Writing things like “I’m so anti-it I can’t put it into words”. When I wrote this poem I had been reading Clark Coolidge’s mesmerising A Book Beginning What and Ending Away; I was trying to channel its expansiveness and radiation: “why is not always everything of mind a find”. But I was also trying desperately to knuckle down to what Lorine Niedecker in ‘Poets Work’ calls: “condensery”, stripping back. These two got me to thinking about trees, their bark and mutability. And from there, about all these days I spent or imagine I spent as a teenager mooching about with friends and my dog-friend Dayna, in Mine Woods, Bridge of Allan, in a fug of music, books, otherness, etc. I’m going to stop there before I start sounding like I’m auditioning for Call Me By Your Name.
