"Wood" [David Kinloch]

Wood
David Kinloch

Heartwood in softwood thought of Adam
and the chair back he gave the young gardener.
Sapwood in softwood remembered the shadow
cast by the apple on bark; springwood,
too young to recall much at all, imagined
the coming and going under the palm tree
at Timnah and corewood still felt the essential
pain of being bush in a world thinking itself
divine. Latewood allowed a final
sparrow to take its last blood red berry.
Then they shrugged and began to concentrate
on cell length, wall thickness, cellulose crystallinity.
Between them they wove their own myths
about moisture and fire, never took earth for granted.

"Wood" by David Kinloch appears in the current issue of Blackbox Manifold. In a recent interview Kinloch was asked about the influence of others in his writing and what the interviewer, Richard Price, called a "gay poetry": "You respond to what you can use in other writers' work and discard the rest ... I think I've said enough so far to suggest that my writing seeks to do more than express or posit a 'gay identity' if that is what 'gay poetry' does. This sounds like a variation on the chestnut: are you a gay writer or a writer who just happens to be gay? I'm both, alternately and sometimes at the same time. Some of my work playfully interrogates what I consider to be prejudice and injustice. If that makes me a gay writer then I'm proud to be one. But I do other things as well."