Tree being in Peter Larkin’s “Skies in Flight of Trees”

This essay reads Peter Larkin's twelve-part poem, “Skies in Flight of Tree” (2019), in the context of critical plant studies to assert the affective energy of trees. With reference to Eduardo Kohn, Emanuele Coccia, and Michael Marder, the essay suggests that Larkin's poem sacralizes this affective energy as a form of being connected to the inclusive, collective, and organizational cosmology of Catholicism. It posits that tree being rejects the logic of depletion and extraction, one that Larkin translates into a prayerful language that brings his readers into an intimate relationship with the material world. While he warns of the pressures of organic relations, Larkin ultimately reveals prayer as that which grants humans access (he calls it “breathable admittance”) to the participatory and meditative thinking patterns of the other-than-human, tree and sky alike. In imagining and so practicing this thinking in “Skies in Flight of Tree,” Larkin reads trees not simply as part of a diminishing economy of geological deposits, but as beings that exemplify relationships built on plenitude rather than scarcity