Dart

by Alice Oswald

  Dart

  ALICE OSWALD

  DART

  Acknowledgements

  Too many people have helped with this poem for me to mention them all, but the following, in no particular order, have made significant contributions:

  Tom Greeves Gerry

  lain Mounsy Ric and Angie Palmer

  Steven Westcott Simon Ellyatt

  Sue Bragg Chris Scoble

  Anonymous walker Richard Scoble

  Peter Oswald Jim Scoble

  Judy Gordan-Jones Ted Bloomfield

  Mark Beeson Kevin Pyne

  David Pakes Sid Griffiths

  Mike Maslin Matt Griffiths

  Rupert Lane John Riddel

  Susan Clifford Jilly Sutton

  Angela King Jane Hill

  Steve Roberts Sean Borodale

  John Wilson Caroline Drew

  Andrew Dutfield Captain Dadd

  Eddie Campbell Thomas Kirsten Saunders

  Nigel Gibson John Lane

  Mike Ingram (for National Trust) The Trustees of Dartington

  Charles and Mary Keen Hall

  William Keen Chris Burcher

  Ellie Keen Trudy Turrell

  Laura Beatty Tim Robins

  Barrie Lorring Ray Humphries

  3 anonymous poachers Tony Dixon

  Joe and Lyle Oswald Roger Deakin

  Bram Bartlett Colin Hawkins

  This poem was written and developed as part of the Poetry Society’s Poetry Places scheme funded by the ‘Arts for Everyone’ budget of the Arts Council of England’s Lottery Department.

  This poem is made from the language of people who live and work on the Dart. Over the past two years I’ve been recording conversations with people who know the river. I’ve used these records as life-models from which to sketch out a series of characters – linking their voices into a sound-map of the river, a songline from the source to the sea. There are indications in the margin where one voice changes into another. These do not refer to real people or even fixed fictions. All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings.

  A.O.

  Who’s this moving alive over the moor?

  An old man seeking and finding a difficulty.

  Has he remembered his compass his spare socks

  does he fully intend going in over his knees off the military track from Okehampton?

  keeping his course through the swamp spaces

  and pulling the distance around his shouldersthe source of the Dart – Cranmere Pool on Dartmoor, seven miles from the nearest road

  and if it rains, if it thunders suddenly

  where will he shelter looking round

  and all that lies to hand is his own bones?

  tussocks, minute flies,

  wind, wings, roots

  He consults his map. A huge rain-coloured wilderness.

  This must be the stones, the sudden movement,

  the sound of frogs singing in the new year.

  Who’s this issuing from the earth?

  The Dart, lying low in darkness calls out Who is it?

  trying to summon itself by speaking …the walker replies

  An old man, fifty years a mountaineer, until my heart gave out,

  so now I’ve taken to the moors. I’ve done all the walks, the Two

  Moors Way, the Tors, this long winding line the Dart

  this secret buried in reeds at the beginning of sound I

  won’t let go of man, under

  his soakaway ears and his eye ledges working

  into the drift of his thinking, wanting his heart

  I keep you folded in my mack pocket and I’ve marked in red

  where the peat passes are and the good sheep tracks

  cow-bones, tin-stones, turf-cuts.

  listen to the horrible keep-time of a man walking,

  rustling and jingling his keys

  at the centre of his own noise,

  clomping the silence in pieces and I

  I don’t know, all I know is walking. Get dropped off the military track from Oakehampton and head down into Cranmere pool. It’s dawn, it’s a huge sphagnum kind of wilderness, and an hour in the morning is worth three in the evening. You can hear plovers whistling, your feet sink right in, it’s like walking on the bottom of a lake.

  What I love is one foot in front of another. South-south-west and down the contours. I go slipping between Black Ridge and White Horse Hill into a bowl of the moor where echoes can’t get out

  listen,

  a

  lark

  spinning

  around

  one

  note

  splitting

  and

  mending

  it

  and I find you in the reeds, a trickle coming out of a bank, a foal of a river

  one step-width water

  of linked stones

  trills in the stones

  glides in the trills

  eels in the glides

  in each eel a fingerwidth of sea

  in walking boots, with twenty pounds on my back: spare socks, compass, map, water purifier so I can drink from streams, seeing the cold floating spread out above the morning,

  tent, torch, chocolate, not much else.

  Which’ll make it longish, almost unbearable between my evening meal and sleeping, when I’ve got as far as stopping, sitting in the tent door with no book, no saucepan, not so much as a stick to support the loneliness

  he sits clasping his knees, holding his face low down between them,

  he watches black slugs,

  he makes a little den of his smells and small thoughts

  he thinks up a figure far away on the tors

  waving, so if something does happen,

  if night comes down and he has to leave the path

  then we’ve seen each other, somebody knows where we are.

  falling back on appropriate words

  turning the loneliness in all directions …

  through Broadmarsh, under Cut Hill,

  Sandyhole, Sittaford, Hartyland, Postbridge,

  Belever, Newtake, Dartmeet, the whole

  unfolding emptiness branching and reaching

  and bending over itself.

  I met a man sevenish by the river

  where it widens under the main road

  and adds a strand strong enough

  to break branches and bend back necks.

  Rain. Not much of a morning.

  Routine work, getting the buckets out

  and walking up the cows – I know you,

  Jan Coo. A Wind on a deep pool. Jan Coo: his name means So-and-So of the Woods, he haunts the dark.

  Cows know him, looking for the fork in

  They know the truth of him – a strange man –

  I’m soaked, fuck these numb hands.

  A tremor in the woods. A salmon under a stone.

  I know who I am, I

  come from the little heap of stones up by Postbridge, Postbridge is the where first road crosses the Dart

  you’ll have seen me feeding the stock, you can tell it’s me

  because of the wearing action of water on bone.

  Oh I’m slow and sick, I’m

  trying to talk myself round to leaving this place,

  but there’s roots growing round my mouth, my foot’s

  in a rusted tin. One night I will.

  And so one night he sneaks away downriver,

  told us he could hear voices woooo

  we know what voices means, Jan Coo Jan Coo.

  A white feather on the water keeping dry.

  Next morning it came home to us he was drowned.

  He should never have swum on his own.

  Now he’s so thin you can see the light

  through his
skin, you can see the filth in his midriff.

  Now he’s the groom of the Dart – I’ve seen him

  taking the shape of the sky, a bird, a blade,

  a fallen leaf, a stone – may he lie long

  in the inexplicable knot of the river’s body chambermaid

  in a place of bracken and scattered stone piles and cream teas in the tourist season, comes the chambermaid unlocking every morning with her peach-soap hands: Only me, Room-Cleaning, number twenty-seven, an old couple – he’s blind, she’s in her nineties. They come every month walking very slowly to the waterfall. She guides him, he props her. She sees it, he hears it. Gently resenting each other’s slowness: (Where are we turning you are tending to slide is it mud what is that long word meaning burthensome it’s as if mud was issuing from ourselves don’t step on the trefoil listen a lark going up in the dark would you sshhhhh?) Brush them away, squirt everything, bleach and vac and rubberglove them into a bin-bag, please do not leave toenails under the rugs, a single grey strand in the basin

  shhh I can make myself invisible Naturalist

  with binoculars in moist places. I can see frogs

  hiding under spawn – water’s sperm – whisper, I wear soft colours

  whisper, this is the naturalist

  she’s been out since dawn

  dripping in her waterproof notebook

  I’m hiding in red-brown grass all different lengths, bog bean, sundew, I get excited by its wetness, I watch spiders watching aphids, I keep my eyes in crevices, I know two secret places, call them x and y where the Large Blue Butterflies are breeding, it’s lovely, the male chasing the female, frogs singing lovesongs

  she loves songs, she belongs to the soundmarks of larks

  I knew a heron once, when it got up

  its wings were the width of the river,

  I saw it eat an eel alive

  and the eel the eel chewed its way back inside out through the heron’s stomach

  like when I creep through bridges right in along a ledge to see where the dippers nest.

  Going through holes, I love that, the last thing through here was an otter

  (two places I’ve Seen eels, bright Whips of flow by the bridge, an eel watcher

  like stopper waves the rivercurve slides through

  trampling around at first you just make out

  the elver movement of the running sunlight

  three foot under the road-judder you hold

  and breathe contracted to an eye-quiet world

  while an old dandelion unpicks her shawl

  and one by one the small spent oak flowers fall

  then gently lift a branch brown tag and fur

  on every stone and straw and drifting burr

  when like a streamer from your own eye’s iris

  a kingfisher spurts through the bridge whose axis

  is endlessly in motion as each wave

  photos its flowing to the bridge’s curve

  if you can keep your foothold, snooping down

  then suddenly two eels let go get thrown

  tumbling away downstream looping and linking

  another time we scooped a net through sinking

  silt and gold and caught one strong as bike-chain

  stared for a while then let it back again

  I never pass that place and not make time

  to see if there’s an eel come up the stream

  I let time go as slow as moss, I stand

  and try to get the dragonflies to land

  their gypsy-coloured engines on my hand)

  whose voice is this who’s talking in my larynx

  who’s in my privacy under my stone tent

  where I live slippershod in my indoor colours

  who’s talking in my lights-out where I pull to

  under the bent body of an echo are these your

  fingers in my roof are these your splashes

  Everyone converges on bridges, bank holidays it fills up with cars, people set up tables in the reeds, but a mile either side you’re back into wilderness. (Twelve horses clattering away.) and there’s the dipper bobbing up and down like a man getting ready, hitching his trousers. I’m crouching, I never let my reflection fall on water,

  I depend on being not noticed, which keeps me small and rather nimble, I can swim miles naked with midges round my head, watching wagtails, I’m soft, I’m an otter streaking from the headwaters, I run overland at night, I watch badgers, I trespass, don’t say anything, I’ve seen waternymphs, I’ve seen tiny creatures flying, trapped, intermarrying, invisible

  upriver creatures born into this struggle against

  water out of balance being swept away

  mouthparts clinging to mosses

  round streamlined creatures born into vanishing

  between golden hide-outs, trout at the mercy of rush

  quiver to keep still always

  swimming up through it hiding

  freshwater shrimps driven flat in this struggle against

  haste pitching through stones

  things suck themselves to rocks

  things swinging from side to side

  leak out a safety line to a leaf and

  grip for dear life a sandgrain or gravel for ballast

  thrown into this agony of being swept away

  with ringing everywhere though everything is also silent

  the spider of the rapids running over the repeated note

  of disorder and rhythm in collision, the simulacrum fly

  spinning a shelter of silk among the stones

  and all the bright-feathered flies of the fishermen, indignant under the waterfall, in waders, getting their feet into position to lean over and move the world: medics, milkmen, policemen, millionaires, cheering themselves up with the ratchet and swish of their lines fisherman and bailiff

  I’ve payed fifty pounds to fish here and I fish like hell, I know the etiquette – who wades where – and I know the dark places under stones where things are moving. I caught one thirteen pounds at Belever, huge, silvery, maybe seven times back from the sea, now the sea-trout, he’s canny, he’ll keep to his lie till you’ve gone, you have to catch him at night.

  Which is where the law comes in, the bailiff, as others see me, as I see myself when I wake, finding myself in this six-foot fourteen-stone of flesh with letters after my name, in boots, in a company vehicle, patrolling from the headwaters to the weir, with all my qualified faculties on these fish.

  When the owls are out up at Newtake. You cast behind and then forwards in two actions. Casting into darkness for this huge, it’s like the sea’s right there underneath you, this invisible

  now I know my way round darkness, I’ve got night vision, I’ve been up here in the small hours waiting for someone to cosh me but

  it’s not frightening if you know what you’re doing. There’s a sandbar, you can walk on it right across the weirpool but

  I hooked an arm once, petrified, slowly pulling a body up, it was only a cardigan

  but when you’re onto a salmon,

  a big one hiding under a rock, you can see his tail making the water move,

  you let the current work your fly

  all the way from Iceland, from the Faroes,

  a three-sea-winter fish coming up on the spate,

  on the full moon, when the river spreads out

  a thousand feet between Holne and Dartmeet and he climbs it,

  up the trickiest line, maybe

  maybe down-flowing water has an upcurrent nobody knows

  it takes your breath away,

  generations of them inscribed into this river,

  up at Belever where the water’s only so wide

  you can see them crowded in there

  shining like tin, the hen-fish swishing her tail

  making a little vortex, lifting the gravel

  which is where the law comes in – I know all the articles, I hide in the bushes with my diploma and along comes the Tavistock boys
, they’ve only got to wet their arms and grab, it’s like shoplifting. Names I won’t mention. In broad daylight, in the holding pools. Run up and stone the water and the salmon dodges under a ledge. Copper snares, three-pronged forks – I know what goes on, I’m upfront but I’m tactful.

  I wear green for the sake of kingfishers.

  I walk across the weir, on the phone in the middle of the river,

  technically effective, at ease in my own power,

  working my way downstream doing rod-license checks

  with his torch, taking his own little circle of light

  through pole-straight pinewoods,

  slippy oakwoods, sudden insurrections of rowan,

  reedholes and poor sour fields,

  in the thick of bracken, keeping the law

  from dwindling away

  through Belever Whiteslade

  Babeny

  Newtake

  (meanwhile the West Dart pours through the west Dart rises under Cut Hill‚ not far from the source of the East Dart

  Crow Tor Fox Holes

  Longaford Beardown and Wystman’s Wood

  and under Crockern Tor, singing

  where’s Ernie? Under the ground the dead tinners speak

  where’s Redver’s Webb? Likewise.

  Tom, John and Solomon Warne, Dick Jorey, Lewis Evely?

  Some are photos, others dust.

  Heading East to West along the tin lodes,

  80 foot under Hexworthy, each with a tallow candle in his hat.

  Till rain gets into the stone,

  which washes them down to the valley bottoms

  and iron, lead, zinc, copper calcite