Dart

by Alice Oswald

  and gold, a few flakes of it

  getting pounded between the pebbles in the river.

  Bert White, John Coaker.

  Frank Hellier, Frank Rensfield,

  William Withycombe, Alex Shawe, John Dawe, William Friend,

  their strength dismantled and holding only names

  Two Bridges, Dunnabridge, Hexworthy)

  Dartmeet – a mob of waters

  where East Dart smashes into West Dart

  two wills gnarling and recoiling

  and finally knuckling into balance

  in that brawl of mudwaves

  the East Dart speaks Whiteslade and Babeny

  the West Dart speaks a wonderful dark fall

  from Cut Hill through Wystman’s Wood

  put your ear to it, you can hear water

  cooped up in moss and moving

  slowly uphill through lean-to trees

  where every day the sun gets twisted and shut

  with the weak sound of the wind

  rubbing one indolent twig upon another

  and the West Dart speaks roots in a pinch of clitters

  the East Dart speaks coppice and standards

  the East Dart speaks the Gawler Brook and the Wallabrook

  the West dart speaks the Blackabrook that runs by the prison

  at loggerheads, lying next to one another on the riverbed

  wrangling away into this valley of oaks forester

  and here I am coop-felling in the valley, felling small sections to give the forest some structure. When the chainsaw cuts out the place starts up again. It’s Spring, you can work in a wood and feel the earth turning

  woodman working on your own waternymph

  knocking the long shadows down

  and all day the river’s eyes

  peep and pry among the trees

  when the lithe Water turns Dart is old Devonian for oak

  and its tongue flatters the ferns

  do you speak this kind of sound:

  whirlpool whisking round?

  Listen, I can clap and slide

  my hollow hands along my side.

  imagine the bare feel of water,

  woodman, to the wrinkled timber

  When nesting starts I move out. Leaving the thickety places for the birds. Redstart, Pied Flycatchers. Or if I’m thinning, say every twelve trees I’ll orange-tape what I want to keep. I’ll find a fine one, a maiden oak, well-formed with a good crop of acorns and knock down the trees around it. And that tree’ll stand getting slowly thicker and taller, taking care of its surroundings, full of birds and moss and cavities where bats’ll roost and fly out when you work into dusk

  woodman working into twilight

  you should see me in the moonlight

  comb my cataract of hair,

  at work all night on my desire

  oh I could sing a song of Hylas,

  how the water wooed him senseless,

  I could sing the welded kiss

  continuous of Salmacis

  and bring an otter from your bowels

  to slip in secret through my veils

  to all the plump and bony pools

  the dips the paps the folds the holes

  Trees like that, when they fall the whole place feels different, different air, different creatures entering the gap. I saw two roe deer wandering through this morning. And then the wind’s got its foot in and singles out the weaklings, drawn up old coppice stems that’ve got no branches to give them balance. I generally leave the deadwood lying. They say all rivers were once fallen trees. Or tush it to one of the paths, stacks of it with bracket fungus and it goes for pulp or pallets or half-cleave it into fence-stakes

  woodman working on the crags

  alone among increasing twigs

  notice this, next time you pause

  to drink a flask and file the saws

  the Combestone and the Broadstone

  standing in a sunbeam gown,

  the O Brook and the Rowbrook

  starlit everywhere you look

  such deep woods it feels like indoors and then you look down and see it’s raining on the river

  O Rex Nemorensis the King of the Oakwoods who had to be sacrificed to a goddess.

  Oaks whose arms

  are whole trees

  in spring when ‘Dart Dart Every year thou Claimest a heart.’

  the river gives

  up her dead

  I saw you

  rise dragging your

  shadows in water

  all summer I

  saw you soaked

  through and sinking

  and the crack

  and shriek as

  you lost bones

  God how I

  wish I could

  bury death deep

  under the river

  like that canoeist near Newbridge, a canoeist drowned

  just testing his

  strokes in the

  quick moving water

  which buried him

  O Flumen Dialis River of Zeus, the god of the Oak. In ancient times the Flamen Dialis was the priest of Zeus

  let him be

  the magical flame

  come spring that

  lights one oak

  off the next

  and the fields

  and workers bursting

  into light amen canoeist

  On Tuesdays we come out of the river at twilight, wet, shouting, with canoes on our heads.

  the river at ease, the river at night.

  We can’t hear except the booming of our thinking in the cockpit hollow and the river’s been so beautiful we can’t concentrate.

  they walk strong in wetsuits,

  their faces shine,

  their well-being wants to burst out

  In the water it’s another matter, we’re just shells and arms, keeping ourselves in a fluid relation with the danger.

  pond-skaters, water-beetles,

  neoprene spray-decks,

  many-coloured helmets,

  But what I love is midweek between Dartmeet and Newbridge; kayaking down some inaccessible section between rocks and oaks in a valley gorge which walkers can’t get at. You’re utterly alone, abandoning everything at every instant, yourself in continuous transition twisting down a steep gradient: big bony boulders, water squeezing in between them, sumps and boils and stopper waves. Times when the river goes over a rock, it speeds up, it slaps into the slower water ahead of it and backs up on itself, literally curls over and you get white water sometimes as high as a bus or house. Like last November, the river rose three or four foot in two hours, right into the fields and I drove like mad to get to Newbridge. I could hear this roaring like some horrible revolving cylinder, I was getting into the river, I hadn’t warmed up, it was still raining, and the surface looked mad, touchy, ready to slide over, and there was this fence underwater, a wave whacked me into it

  come falleth in my push-you where it hurts

  and let me rough you under, be a laugh

  and breathe me please in whole inhale

  come warmeth, I can outcanoevre you

  into the smallest small where it moils up

  and masses under the sloosh gates, put your head,

  it looks a good one, full of kiss

  and known to those you love, come roll it on my stones,

  come tongue-in-skull, come drinketh, come sleepeth

  I was pinioned by the pressure, the whole river-power of Dartmoor, not even five men pulling on a rope could shift me. It was one of those experiences – I was sideways, leaning upstream, a tattered shape in a perilous relationship with time

  will you rustle quietly and listen to what I have to say now

  describing the wetbacks of stones golden-mouthed and

  making no headway, will you unsilt

  how water orders itself like a pack of geese goes up

  first in tatters then in shreds then in threads

  and shucking its po
ols crawls into this slate and thin limestone phase

  three hayfields above Buckfast where annual meadow grasshoppers

  flower and fly to the tune of ribbed stalks rubbed,

  will you swim down and attend to this foundry for sounds

  this jabber of pidgin-river

  drilling these rhythmic cells and trails of scales,

  will you translate for me blunt blink glint.

  is it span of eyes trammelling under the rain-making oaks

  among stones the colour of magpies is it

  suddenly through a padlocked gate

  a green lane sliptoes secretly to the unseen

  steep woods and cows the far side and

  town boys sneak here after school: ‘once town boys

  I jumped off the bus, I walked straight across, it was ice,

  now this is the real river, this is the Queen of the Dart

  where it jinks down like through lawns almost’

  the way I talk in my many-headed turbulence

  among these modulations, this nimbus of words kept in motion

  sing-calling something definitely human,

  will somebody sing this riffle perfectly as the invisible river

  sings it, quite different from this harsh primary

  repertoire of murmurs, without any hardware

  of stones and jointed sticks, one note

  that rives apart the two worlds without any crossing

  ‘I could show you a place it shallows over rocks

  where the salmon flip out sometimes right onto the stones or they used to

  and you could catch them bare-handed, now listen to this,

  I was lugging this fish the size of myself,

  taking the short-cut through the Abbey and up

  picture it, up comes a monk and imagine

  he gives me a suitcase to smuggle it out past the bailiff …’

  Smuggle it under the threshold of listening

  into the ark of the soul, where the invisible

  clear first water, the real Dart

  writhes like a black fire, smelling of fish and soil

  and traces a red leaf flood mark

  and catches a drift of placer gold in her cracks tin-extractor

  you can go down with a wide bowl, where it eddies round bends or large boulders. A special not easy motion, you fill it with gravel and a fair amount of water, you shake it and settle it and tilt it forward. You get a bit of gold, enough over the years to make a wedding ring but mostly these dense black stones what are they?

  He puts them in Hydrochloric acid, it makes his fingers yellow, but they came up shiny, little wobbly nuts of tin

  when I realised what I was onto in my own fields, I began to work slowly upriver looking for the shodes, the bigger tin-stones that lie close to the source. I followed it up a brook of the Dart and built my own alluvial plant with a pump re-circulating the water and a bucket on a drag-line bopping it out and bingo

  Glico of the Running Streams named varieties of water

  and Spio of the Boulders-Encaved-In-The-River’s-

  Edges

  and all other named varieties of Water

  such as Loops and Swirls in their specific dialects

  clucking and clapping

  Cymene and Semaia, sweeping a plectrum along the stones

  and the stones’ hollows hooting back at them

  off-beat, as if luck should play the flute

  can you hear them at all,

  muted and plucked,

  muttering something that can only be expressed as

  hitting a series of small bells just under the level of your listening?

  you rinse it through a shaking screen, you take out a ton of gravelly mud for say fifty pounds of tin and then you smelt it, 1,300 degrees C, that’s amazingly hot, that’s when steel begins to burn and just as it turns it starts melting, evaporating, half your tin disappearing into the air

  can you hear them rustling close by,

  passing from hand to hand

  a little trail of tin more than the weight of stone

  and making the swish of swinging and regaining equilibrium?

  Syrinx and Ligea groping through low-lit stalls

  with silt in their mouths,

  can you not hear them at all? not even the Rain

  starting in several places at once

  or a Fly’s Foot typing on water?

  not even the Stockdove-Falling-

  Upwards-Through-Inverted-Trees

  and calling prrrrooo prrrooo, who’s

  stirring the water about, who’s up

  the green end of the river dislodging stones?

  I, Pol de Zinc, descended from the Norman, keeper of the coin, entrepreneur, allrounder and tin extractor the last of a long line

  William Withycombe, Alex Shawe, John Dawe, William Friend

  and I. Keeper of the Woollen Mills, a fully vertical operation, worker at Buckfast Woollen Mills

  adding a certain amount of detergent, non-ionic, reasonably biodegradable,

  which you have to, when you see how the wool comes in,

  greasy with blue paint, shitty and sweaty with droppings dangling off it.

  Unfortunately sheep don’t use loopaper.

  it’s all very well the fishermen complaining

  but I see us like cormorants, living off the river.

  we depend on it for its soft water the woollen Mill has a license to extract river water for washing the wool and for making up the dyes

  because it runs over granite and it’s relatively free of Calcium

  whereas fishermen for what for leisure

  tufting felting hanks tops spindles slubbings

  hoppers and rollers and slatted belts

  bales of carded wool the colour of limestone

  and wool puffs flying through tubes distributed by cyclones

  wool in the back of the throat, wool on ledges,

  in fields and spinning at 5,000 rotations per minute –

  and look how quickly a worker can mend an end

  what tentacular fingers moving like a spider,

  splicing it invisibly neat look what fingers could be –

  cotton warp, jute weft, wool pile, they work

  lip-reading in a knocking throbbing bobbining hubbub

  transporting the web on slatted belts with a twist to get it transverse,

  then out for lunchbreak, hearing the small sounds of the day

  That smell of old wet sheep.

  I can stand by the fleece pile and pick out the different breeds:

  this coarse lustrous curly one from Dartmoor,

  this straighter one’s a blackface from Scotland.

  We pull apart the fleeces and blend them, we get a mountain, a tor of wool, and load it onto hoppers for washing and keep combing it out, because the lie of wool isn’t smooth and cylindrical like a human hair, it’s scaly like a fish or pine cone, which is why you get felting when the scales get locked and can’t release.

  We do pure wool, one of the last places – red carpets, for Japenese weddings. Which we dye in pressure vessels, 600 different shades, it’s skilled work, a machine with criss-cross motion makes up the hanks and we hang them in the dye-house. Bear in mind if it rains, there’s peat in the river-water, full of metals, tin and such-like which when you consider dyes are mostly metals, we split the web and rub it into slubbings and from there onto bobbins we stretch and wind it on a spinning frame – a ring and travel arrangement twists it in the opposite direction and we end up with two-ply, a balanced twist, like the river Theodore Schwenke

  ‘whenever currents of water meet the confluence is always the place

  where rhythmical and spiralling movements may arise,

  spiralling surfaces which glide past one another in manifold winding and curving forms

  new water keeps flowing through each single strand of water

  whole surfaces interweaving spatially and flowing past each other

&nb
sp; in surface tension, through which water strives to attain a spherical drop-form’

  wound onto reels and packed into bales

  tied with polypropylene and cling film to keep it dry on the sea.

  all day my voice is being washed away at Staverton Ford, John Edmunds being washed away, 1840

  out of a lapse in my throat

  like after rain

  little trails of soil-creep

  loosen into streams

  if I shout out,

  if I shout in,

  I am only as wide

  as a word’s aperture

  but listen! if you listen

  I will move you a few known sounds

  in a constant irregular pattern:

  flocks of foxgloves spectating slightly bending …

  o I wish I was slammicking home

  in wet clothes, shrammed with cold and bivvering but

  this is my voice

  under the spickety leaves,

  under the knee-nappered trees

  rustling in its cubby-holes

  and rolling me round, like a container

  upturned and sounded through

  and the silence pouring into what’s left maybe eighty seconds

  silence

  Menyahari – we scream in mid-air. swimmer

  We jump from a tree into a pool, we change ourselves

  into the fish dimension. Everybody swims here