Bark, Archive, Splinter
Bark, Archive, Splinter
Mutt of pine. Must each orange tick be painted and clear progress
────────────────────accumulation
Wherever the cloud-shepherd earth gives way for breeding ash, notanda, vellum, drafting mistletoe, black sunlight, clearances, hidden life, marking corrupt pastoral, vestigial colonies, and fog over glare over thistle over broom over brassica over timbre over errata over kingdoms over. For the record
Missing witness trees as mass media
You select the same sequence of strange encounters over. A uniform lyric expression
Even up there, remaindered in the almanac of what is said to be untranslatable, liquid speech egresses
Ambient river of phantom canopies: leftover body of work
────────────────────────────holes
Diasporic hunger to metabolise all this minted nature
So you pinch these lines and databases from a world rewilded. Promise to recoup spent wonder
Mustering diction in the interest of the non-human
To roster a higher rank of wilted sleep. Refuse to register the excess of your rounded mutter
──────────────────────────────ledger
Bark, Archive, Splinter
Bark, archive, splinter
Following pandemics of ink disease and voyages in reverse, can wordhoard be both measure and buffer
Inline with fluctuating numbers along critical food chains
Your remit is to forge the full stress of globally lavish adjectives
To get close to the subject. His subject
Trespassing past headstones towards the willow, the thorn, the poplar, the plane, the oak, the maple, the linden, the laurel, the holm, the hazel, the fir, the elm, the dogwood, the chestnut, the box, the birch, the beech, the aspen, the ash, the alder, and the
Absent addressee. Assembling a defence for the organic in the shade of poisonous yews
The second person must be plural. Fingering its arils, you discover yew trees inhibit the viable decoding of these groves ──────────────────────────── ──────────────graves
After persistent 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 tenderriven 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
Biography
Jay Gao is a poet from Edinburgh, Scotland, living in New York City. His second poetry collection The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber is forthcoming in Fall 2026 from Nightboat Books and Carcanet Press. 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.
Competing Interests
The author has no competing interests to declare.