Trees’ Deep Incarnation: The Scarcity- Gift of Peter Larkin’s ‘praying // \\ firs attentuate’

In a context of ecological calling forth, with regard both to human impacts on other kind and the agency of more than humans, this essay situates firs and their active relation to appeal/prayer in Peter Larkin's 'praying // firs \\ attenuate' in the contexts of: biblical trees, Ming dynasty artist Shen Zhou's 'Night Vigil',and plantation firs. The essay, then, describes firs' participation in the non-binary, indeterminate process of call-response at play in the poem,especially through Larkin's trope of scarcity-gift. The ecotheological concept of 'deep incarnation', particularly as it relates to the cross, offers a way of approaching this concept of scarcity-gift and, moreover, opens to an ecological night of the soul, which rather than 'dark' could be described as 'a green night of the soul'. Larkin's poem offers an uncanny engagement in this 'night' through inviting the reader into a 'cloud of unknowing' with respect to both fir and writing. In this process of invitation a reader finds herself called forth to a mode of attentiveness. This attention extends beyond the immediate but necessarily distant firs of the poem. By way of conclusion, the author marks her own being called forth by Larkin's 'praying // firs \\ attenuate', to attend to local trees in writing.Publisher's note: This article was originally published referring to the title of Peter Larkin's poem as 'praying firs // \\ attentuate', which has now been corrected.


Introduction
In their postscript to a 2013 Australian collection of essays Writing Creates Ecology, Ecology Creates Writing, Deborah Bird Rose and Martin Harrison, who have both since left us too soon, speak about ' a kind of mindfulness … that is something we are part of and orient ourselves in rather than something which we own or have'. 1 While the term 'mindfulness' can conjure up the self-help section of bookshops, here Rose and Harrison are exploring the way our perceptions are both limited and participatory in wider other-than-human communications, ' caught in that moment of transfer between thing and thing'. 2 It is this being ' caught' in a more-than-human moment of encounter that I read in Peter Larkin's poem 'praying firs // \\ attenuate'. 3 In this moment, as Harrison argues, the manufactured gap between humans and otherkind is increasingly palpable, at the same time as the beauties of otherkind fill our screens and, as Rose responds, humans nevertheless wake from ecological nightmare to further nightmare. 4 At stake are questions of more-than-human being, agency and intent, and the sway of these on the poet who admits their entreaties as something like prompts for writing, prayer or both.
This essay begins by situating prompting firs and their active relation to appeal/prayer in Larkin's poem in the contexts of: biblical trees, Ming dynasty artist Shen Zhou's 'Night Vigil', and plantation firs. Then I describe firs' participation in the non-binary, indeterminate process of call-response at play in the poem especially in the trope of scarcity-gift. I suggest that the ecotheological concept of 'deep incarnation', especially as it relates to the cross, offers a helpful way of approaching this scarcity-gift and opens to an ecological night of the soul, which could be described as 'a green night of the soul'. Larkin's poem offers an uncanny engagement in this 'night' through inviting the reader into a 'cloud of unknowing' with respect to both fir and poem, so that the reader is called forth in turn to a mode of attentiveness -and not only to the necessarily distant firs of the poem. By way of conclusion, I mark my own being called forth by Larkin's 'praying firs // \\ attentuate' in my local Australian context, through my poetic response to/with tea tree and banyan figs.

Biblical Trees Animated
Scripted in matter, trees pray occasionally, even sparsely, in the pages of the Bible, pages themselves continuing to be constructed by the millions, if not billions, from other trees: 5 let the field exult, and everything in it.
Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy. 6 Biblical trees are cut down or torn up, burnt, and destroyed by drought, in the name of human wars or when the land enforces divine judgement on the people or their enemies. Trees appear as sources of food and prohibition, sites of execution, vessels, idyllic shelter, wood to fuel the fires of sacrifice, acacia in the construction of an ark, cedar for Solomon's temple, or with stone as the stuff from which other gods are constructed. They also serve as symbols of human flourishing. 7 Biblical trees are simultaneously consumable and coagents in human and divine endeavours, and they shadow the unfolding of civilisations of the book. 8 A biblical animism, of which praying trees are one example, sits next to a Christian tradition of the Book of Nature, read both alongside and, if the Earth Bible Team is correct, within, the Book of Scripture to reveal the divine/sacred. 9 John Milbank comments, 'the book of nature has been rendered by Peter Larkin once more articulate, and its coding (as once intimated by the Celtic cultures) in the alphabet of the trees has become once more, through his writing, somewhat decipherable'. 10 The tendrils of Larkin's praying firs reach into and radiate from the grounds of biblical animism and natural revelation, but are not rooted there. 11 They tend toward their own uncanny ground, where root, trunk and needle answer to and call forth soil, light and water, as part of their prayerful, undefinable 'yes' of being and being-toward, or perhaps that is what I want to read there. 12 In 'praying // \\ firs attenuate', prayer and trees, trees and prayer are ravelled into one another beyond the usual literary persuasions of allegory, simile, metaphor, metonymy, even found-ness. This ravelling resists a reader's (this reader's) instinct toward comprehension when the text writes a complex attentiveness that is saturated, that may be apprehended only provisionally. It is this quality of attention, as Harrison argues, that informs an ecopoetic ethics: 'In the current moment it is clear that we must listen to what is other than human and how it is speaking to us and that the act of attention between self and the environment is intertwined and interdependent and completely mutual'. 13 This attentiveness itself has a quality that is prayer-like in the contemplative tradition.
Larkin's poetic, ravelled saturations work on the breath, holding, catching, releasing, shifting, perhaps akin to what Paul Celan describes as a breath turn, Atemwende. 14 Milbank is careful to distinguish Larkin's style from Celan's, but both poets share this attentive turn. 15 Considering shifts of language and grammar, and the unsettling of a reader's expectations of meaning in Larkin's 'Leaves of Field', Jonathan Skinner writes: 'Naming of unfamiliar structures and processes adds layers to predications that would feel familiar were the phrases more sequential (as if we were reading Paul Celan in the language of woodlots)'. 16 By way of language, Larkin and Celan face and encounter alterities, different in kind though these are, and do not flinch or turn away, inviting readers to participate as witness, if only to our own undoing, but perhaps also by our opening to other possibilities.

Chinese Trees Mediated
In Larkin's sequence 'Hollow Allow Woods' an introductory note situates the poem geographically. 17 I was looking for something like this in 'praying // \\ firs attenuate' to place materially, physically, located-ly the firs of the poem. So I googled English firs and found many images of Christmas trees and Christmas tree plantations. Firs, and conifers more generally, seem to be interchangeable in the 'mind' of Google. Alone at Night', where a text on contemplation stands above a painting of stylised pines, a small human habitation, and mountains. 19 Prynne writes: There, beneath a layer of hovering misty vapour, precipitated by the cooling of moisture-bearing air after sundown, and within the central shelter, sits the upright solitary scholar in meditation-posture on his low dais or kang, arms folded as the mark of bodily inaction, his books beside him on the table which also supports the candle-holder: a diminutive self-figure whose inner mind is fully disclosed in this outward scene, the interior of his shelter bright from the single candle, all held in motionless contemplation. 20 The contemplative sits in a shelter under the sparse but towering dome of two firs.

Prynne comments:
He has his back to the mountains which are not in his immediate field of view, even were the moon bright enough to allow them to be glimpsed at least in profile; they are part of his familiar inward knowledge of companionable forms, in the general darkness outside, rather than visible to him as they are to us: we need to see what he already knows. 21 The firs overhang his meditation, but as his gaze is turned downward they are, like the mountains, not in his view; rather the firs are offered to the gaze of the viewer as the contemplative's 'familiar inward knowledge of companionable forms'.
In 'praying // \\ firs attenuate', does Larkin similarly offers his 'familiar inward knowledge of companionable forms' -gained, in part at least, through attentive contemplation in relation with the physical being of firs in their situatedness -or does he unsettle such knowing?

Plantation Firs
While 'praying // \\ firs attenuate' may owe a debt to Shen Zhou and J.H. Prynne at the level of prompting, the 'inward knowledge' of firs that Larkin's poem sequence gives to the page and to the reader is beyond two painted firs in a fifteenth-century Chinese painting. Section IV of Larkin's poem introduces 'the tooled plantation's deferring-to'. 22 Perhaps Google was not so far off after all, calling up images of plantation firs. G.C. Waldrep writes, 'Positing prayer and industrial plantations of fir trees as tangent regimens, it ['praying // \\ firs attenuate'] deftly crisscrosses the seam of human and non-human endeavour, as if binding a wound'. 23 I will return to this image of the poem as wound-binder below.
The image of the plantation is one of enforced, planned relation, a human-tooled imposition of world, into which the tree nonetheless projects its own world negotiating relations of scarcity and abundance, poverty and grace, where these qualities of experience are not binaries but coincide or, better, interlace. 'Plantation' calls up not only notions of human intervention but also images more generally of plants and planting, so that prayer is subject to planting ' on its | raked slope', and the poem asks 'how' this might happen. 24 While 'prayer' may be 'not like a fir', it might 'become a neck of fir || pro-plantational'. 25 There is a circularity here, as the poem moves from This implies, it seems, that the communality of the plantation, however much it does not resemble an old growth forest with its biodiverse understory, tends toward the (non-)activity of prayer.
The stanza following this concession asserts, 'it isn't virgin forest | pleads origin'. 27 This line, 'pleads origin', pushes me toward Genesis 1 and 2, and narratives of material creaturely origins, of the dual imaginaries of a self-revealing Earth putting forth vegetation and a deity planting a garden. On a self-revealing Earth, I am thinking of Catherine Keller's reading of Genesis 1.2, resisting doctrines of creation ex nihilo. 28 She does this through positing the tohu va bohu -as Robert Alter translates, 'welter and waste', rather than ' a formless void' in the New Revised Standard Version -to be both the originary matter and the repressed depths from which the created order emerges. 29 I am thinking, also, of Norman Habel's description of Earth's emergence in Genesis 1.9 as a 'geophany', a revelation of what was already there beneath the waters. 30 On the divine gardener, I am thinking of Genesis 2.8, where God puts the human creature (a groundling, ha adam) moulded from the ground (ha adamah) into the garden God has planted. This is repeated in Genesis 2.15, when God places (or leaves) the groundling (ha adam) in the garden 'to serve' (often translated as 'till') and 'keep' (meaning also, 'watch' or 'preserve') it. In these narratives of creation, a definitive singular material origin is eschewed alongside a beginning of plantation, albeit plantation not as dominion but as a kind of ' divine service'. 31 While I have feminist reservations about the use of the adjective 'virgin' in the vernacular to refer to a forest supposedly 'untouched' or 'unspoiled' by humans (men?), the poem's negation 'it isn't virgin forest' read in conjunction with a Genesis unsettling of origins, suggests likewise a rethinking of narratives of origin, as expressed in concepts of the pure wood; the pristine forest. The poem instead returns the reader to the tooled/raked treescape, living its poverties and scarcities with resilience: but conifer stands ripened to alienation heeding their intemperate spires 32 It is as if, as Milbank notes in another way, firs, in the particularity of their plantational possibilities and duress, also stand in for trees as always already at the behest of and responsive to the scarcities that are their inheritance whether as divine creations or Earthy emanations, or both together. 33 So, I suggest, that the firs of Larkin's 'praying // \\ firs attenuate' are not only plantation firs; their identity is multiple and shifting. Moreover, while the problematics of ecological trauma to trees and much else are real, Larkin offers a perspective of co-attentiveness that sees trees as responsive to situation in ingenious ways that open in the poet-observer to prayer: … to be prayed not at a shadow of prayer's poverty but already expressive in the shadow 34 Both firs and prayer, praying firs and poet praying share this relation to poverty, to scarcity, a co-relation that, as I will consider below, is encountered as gift.

A Vocation of Trees
In the worlds of a tree, which contra Martin Heidegger are not poor despite their relation to poverty, responsiveness to situation can be understood within the interlaced frame of call-response, where neither is prior to, but already prompting, the other. 35 I have in mind Jean-Louis Chrétien's notion of being as already a 'yes' to a call, the response to which is necessarily choral, but also Rose's evocation of flowering trees and fruit bats in Australia. 36 They mutually call each other forth through their 'yes' to one another; their interdependence is a mutual being-toward that is already 'yes'. Reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge's conversation poems, such as 'The Eolian Harp', Larkin, too, invokes Chrétien on call and response, commenting that ' calling out is a response to a prior call from the divine other which transgresses one's selfsufficiency, so that the need to call out is itself a response to that prior call, even though the provenience of the divine call only becomes present within the embodied nature of one's answering'. 37 In this doubled call, which constitutes call-response as non-binary and indeterminate, the return call cannot correspond to what calls; as Larkin comments, for Chrétien 'it is the inability to correspond which constitutes the condition of speaking'. 38

While
Larkin is writing about Coleridge's work, the issue of 'noncorrespondence' is also vital for his own poetry, and the mutuality of 'yes', which I am reading from Rose, pushes up through the 'necessarily choric character at any attempt at an answering cry'. 39 In this vein, I read Larkin in Part III of 'praying // \\ firs attenuate': living a call forward of its echo where its own effect tapers into elation … love remains before a cusp of firs 40 It is not surprising, in this (r)elation of the interlaced 'responsiveness of call' and ' calling-ness of response', that 'love' intervenes as something nonetheless already there. Is this the love that prompts and is fed by attentiveness, love that is integral to the already 'yes' of being? I mean by this question to invoke the kind of love which The line break interrupting ' contingency' emphasises the prefix ' con', which could be taken to be ' against' but in the context stresses the 'with', con-tingency, as accident, but also as always accident-in-relation, a happening-together-with, opening to the possibility of the mutuality of yes. In 'praying // firs \\ attenuate', this 'yes', however, is an unsettling affirmation infected with and graced by scarcity.

Scarcity-Gift
References to scarcity and gift indeed saturate Larkin's writing. In part I of 'praying // firs \\ attenuate', he writes: to flood a poverty along the vein of its scarcity until tall commonality is no longer sparse but fellow continuance 43 Scarcity and poverty are co-descriptors of a shared reality, but they are not the last word. Here they open to possibility through communion, through that shared-ness of reality taken up by the poet, writing obliquely and abundantly not to erase or undo the tragedy of scarcity, but to witness to it in excess and 'with genuine humility, from ever-new angles'. 44 As an angle on Larkin's abundant poetics of scarcity, I turn to a concept finding purchase in ecotheology, namely ' deep incarnation', as introduced by Niels Gregersen and developed by Denis Edwards. 45  only-one-ness is predicated on an imaginary of scarcity that needs to be unsettled. 53 At another level, the over-abundance of consumerist capitalism produces scarcities. As Larkin writes in an essay on William Wordsworth's 'Ruined Cottage': The apparent autonomy of capital, whose main problem has been seen to be the absorption of over-abundant production, has in its turn generated such new scarcities, once the shortage of pure air, clean water and access to open space becomes implicated in a loss of function, or in a mutually diminishing rivalry of functions that is the reality of a degraded environment. 54 Larkin discusses, too, a 'nihilistic objection to scarcity', that 'scarcity insists on a tenuous relation with the essential, with a hyper-natural'. 55 I wonder if this is precisely a nihilistic objection, or rather one that is related to the impossibility of meeting otherkind on their own terms without the imposition of world, whether the case be that this imposition is more or less colonising, more or less benign. A key concern for Larkin is a kind of 'poetics of scarcity' that responds to and calls forth ' an ethical yearning for a good and secure life amid nature', but is both unsettled by and unsettles such desire, and is open to the complexities, the multiplicities and 'unequal dependencies and liabilities' that underscore any attempt to reply with a mutuality between human-and other-kind. 56 By way of answer, though, Larkin signals a 'patience of scarcity' the purpose of which is 'to intercede its recessive differences so as vertically to overdetermine it rather than laterally exceed it'. 57 I admit to being troubled by this apparent preference for the vertical over the horizontal, especially in the context of prayer, historically in Western Christianity an activity oriented toward the heavens/skies. I have in mind an orientation that has in the past signalled (and for some continues to mark) a diminishment of the claims of Earth, in what Habel refers to as a problematic 'heavenism'. 58 But this is not quite what is happening in 'praying // firs \\ attenuate', though the risk is there; rather Larkin's emphasis is on intercession and overdetermination. The kind of vertical-horizontal/Heaven-Earth/creator-creation binary system that could be at issue is unsettled at every moment by a poetics of relation where it is trees that suggest the image of verticality in relation to their rootedness in ground and their variety of limbic and leafy spread or otherwise. In this context verticality signals perhaps a mediated relation between sky and ground, through the tree's photosynthetic processes that actively receive from sun and soil, negotiating a transformation that is nourishing. The being of trees themselves is an answer, though not a certain or readable one, to the objection of essentialism. Larkin, continually, freshly, and with a kind of insistent singlemindedness, responds to this tree-y unreadability in his poetry and poetics.
He writes of a 'scarcity of relation', describing something of the (im)possibilityand I mean this to echo Jacques Derrida's notion of 'the impossible', and 'the gift' as 'the impossible', as simultaneously possible and impossible 59 -of the human-nature relation. 'Scarcity of relation' also evokes: 'finitude's openness to where it cannot go, but before which it stands and is not demeaned: scarcity of relation preserves the horizon of finitude, an encounter with a mode of being not fully itself, but becomingly itself rather than locked into any accelerative becoming'. 60 Scarcity, though not a synonym of finitude, is a privileged expression of it.
Scarcity-in-relation is the experience of a poet attentive to the otherness of fir. Moreover, scarcity describes the reality of multiple lacks embedded in the relations of habitat-tree and habitat-tree-human found in degraded soils and monocultural plantations. While Larkin's firs experience these scarcities, during his poem's performance and calling forth of a posture of being-toward-fir, scarcity is recast as gift. In relation to finitude, scarcity is affirmed not so much in preference to the abundance of an ecosystem in imagined harmony (albeit subject to the different scarcities and hardships of evolutionary becoming) but as the gift -'the impossible' -of being-here-and-now, the ' aneconomic' present that while never quite present stands to one side of human accounting. 61 Creation's interplay of origins/non-originary, emergence/plantation, discussed above, settles-unsettles in the approach of the gift that is neither scarce nor scarcity A 'scorched creation' suggests the tragedy and trauma not only of ecological devastation but also of human war and genocide, especially during the Shoah, and 'writes up ash' points beyond the name of a tree to the witness of poets, especially Celan. This is the inescapable 'real' that infuses but sometimes eludes the trope of scarcity in Larkin's work. At one point of 'praying // \\ firs attenuate', Larkin refers to scarcity that is not received as gift and so provokes 'resentment' and a sense of divine absence. 66 Gift, and prayer as its shoot, cannot be read as naïvely good or as participating simplistically in something that might be called 'the good'. Scarcity, encountered provisionally and persistently through located tree-y epistemologies, becomes for Larkin a space of possibility for the advent of the divine as gift/giving/givenness. 67 Crucifixion describes this relation of scarcity-gift: a crucible of collision (prayer at fir) known even less rampantly than the self's suborned own crux 68 Milbank argues that in Larkin's poetry 'any posthuman immanentism is still more radically countered by the overwhelming thematic of unaccountable verticality: the betraying of ground by a searching for height, even if this quest is doomed to a sacrificial termination that renders every tree indeed a cross'. 69 Emma Mason writes of this crucial relation to scarcity in 'praying // \\ firs attenuate': the broken and ruined landscape reveals and gives forth more of the divine than the pastoral, connected as it is with a sense of scarcity shared by the trees that survive within it and the God to which they reach. His poetry thus lays bare what Tarlo calls a 'non-linguistic world' that speaks by 'pushing at the inadequacies of language' to 'make it do more and be more, even as it expresses frustration at the difficulty of this "saying"'. 70 The relation to inadequacy called up by this shared scarcity, where the cruciform enmattering of divinity and the tree as a kind of cross -not coincident but co-invocational -is a quality of language at the threshold of the non-linguistic worlds of alterity: tree, prayer, divine.
Mason comments on Larkin's ' ability to bring together the ecocritical and the religious in experimental poems that reveal what it means to be in a world in which dualisms like nature/culture, body/mind, subject/object are as unstable as those between spirit/letter, faith/empiricism, and divine/human'. 71 Here language is marked by a relation to scarcity and that relation is marked by a wound, not only the wound of the impossibility of assured communication across alterities, but the wound of the possibility -which is simultaneously the thinkable unthinkability, and thus 'the impossible', sadly always possible -of the other's loss. Following the stanza that ends, 'the self's sub-|orned own crux' quoted above, Larkin continues: 'Prayer takes the flightpath of a world not yet cleared of trees but they already betoken its etiolation'. 72 In relation to a biblically-inflected political ethics, Mark Brett writes of 'kenotic hospitality' toward those whose lives are, in this context let me write, scarcened by ongoing colonialist and imperialist interests and power. 76 I would like to borrow the concept of 'kenotic hospitality' from Brett and apply it to my consideration of 'praying // \\ firs attenuate'. As in Brett's notion, here, too, kenosis and welcome form a doubled movement of hospitable receptivity: to the tree as host requiring a stance that is marked in the poet/reader by kenosis (self-emptying) and plenitude (tree-filling-self). This doubled movement at once self-emptying and tree-filling is echoed through the plenty of Larkin's poetic relation to scarcity, as a kind of poetics of density.

A Cloud of Unknowing
Through a poetics of density, 'praying // \\ firs attenuate' invites the reader into a 'cloud of unknowing' with respect to the tree. The Cloud of Unknowing is itself a book that resists meaning even as it means to describe a process of divestment of meaning. There are problems from an ecological perspective with the anonymous writer's concept of 'a cloud of forgetting' where the contemplative is to put aside 'every created thing': 'Just as the cloud of unknowing lies above you, between you and your God, so you must fashion a cloud of forgetting beneath you, between you and every created thing'. 77 While the Cloud's hierarchical, vertical imaginary is problematic, as is its advice to forget creatures, the notion of a cloud of unknowing is useful when enlisted to describe the relation between self and other, poet and fir. For example, the cloud of unknowing can be adopted to describe both the intermediary, permeable 'space-between' where the impossibility of the poet's knowing firs is acknowledged and lived, and the orientation toward fir that the poet's contemplative stance entails. This is not necessarily to say fir is divine, but to allow that in attentiveness toward firs, and their own fir-y capacity for attunement to divinity, the divine might be approached as if on the other side of a cloud of unknowing.
In relation to this ' cloud of impossibility' -and hear once more the echo of the Derridean impossible as gift -Keller writes of a tradition of ' apophatic relationality', which unsays ' any separative transcendence', but in ways which she needs to relate through complex entanglements of theopoetic language. 78 At the heart of ' apophatic relationality' is love, intense and transformative, enmattered in the beloved of the transfiguration. 79 The cloud that descends in the transfiguration enfolds Jesus and his companions -biblical ancestors, Moses and Elijah, as well as disciples, Peter, James and John -in hospitality. 80 The transfiguration narrative is an icon, or perhaps a theopoetic model, for the enfolding of 'pressing difficulties' and their impossible entanglements so that they/we might unfurl like young growth opening to what comes, as: 'Scarcity precipitates new sacraments'. 81 In a context of planetary, ecological, social, political traumas, Keller proposes in saturated language, that incarnation be reimagined as 'intercarnation' in ways that open to a divine becoming which may be more than human: 'no creature lives outside of bodied participation in its fellows.
And therefore … in God. But some creatures more than others answer to the truth of that participation'. 82 In reading Larkin's 'praying // \\ firs attenuate'-sometimes with breath held, as surface meaning is withheld -my embodied knowing as reader is directed, not away from the unknowable other but toward the density of bole-and-branch, root-inground and tree-in-wood. 83 The agency of firs becomes part of the dense reciprocity of poet and word, poet and matter, poet and world, so that as reader I can never quite tell who is praying: poet or tree, both or neither, or who it is that might 'beseech || co-earthing'. 84 The palms of the hands joined in prayer // \\ become the spires of firs, or vice versa, and tapering firs evoke tapering candles.  89 In 'praying // \\ firs attenuate', this is an uncanny process of kenotic givenness to an other, always unsettled by its knots of giving, being-given-over (and in gospel passion stories this is both betrayal and self-giving), and an ingivenness, which has echoes of Gerard Manley Hopkins' notions of inscape and instress. 90 Moreover, all of this unsettled givenness, which a reader might suppose to describe the poet-contemplativereader, issues as description of fir, not so much as metaphor but as densely woven invocation and -I venture, with an ear to Timothy Morton -co-being, co-existents, perhaps also co-intention. 91 This co-intention becomes invocation; in the face of ecological distress it is a plea: Be lessened in world so as not to assuage its brunt taken at the full let new tallnesses taper with the close-grown over every leached place a spine of outliving become the norm … 92 In the appeal 'be lessened in world' -and the nod to Heidegger needs to be heard -I read a wound-binding poetics, drawing on Waldrep, as Larkin's invocation of a kenotic hospitality. David James Miller reads this as the nearest approach to an apex in the poem. 93 Miller, also referencing Chrétien, describes the 'wound' in language, where divine silence, divine kenosis leaves space for, is hospitable to, speech/speaking. 94 This 'wound' is shifted in the poem toward a voluntary kenosis so that just as divine silence makes way for human speaking, human attentiveness that is prayerlike -perhaps silent, perhaps greeting -makes room for recognition of and respect for the world of the fir, so as to 'let new tallnesses taper' in, and in spite of, ' every leached place'.

By Way of Conclusion: Antipodean Encounters
When I suggest greeting as well as silence as ways of making room for the worlds of otherkind, I am thinking in particular of Australian First Nations' practices of calling out to Country. 95  These imported figs resist the verticality of Larkin's firs through a practice both horizontal and vertical, neither privileging one nor the other, a practice that in age seems to mimic a kind of forest community -of which Peter Wohlleben writes 98 -albeit in a 'single' tree that is in fact multiple, one might say ' catholic', in its spread.
For Mason, Larkin's writing is informed by a Catholic and Teilhardian sacramentality. 99 In saturated language -the kind that Jean-Luc Marion might describe as counter-experiential 100 -the reality of ecological trauma (as a kind of scarcity) is taken up and answered. But this occurs in a context where poetic witness itself is also a mode of 'the impossible', a gift whose giving remains necessary, partial,