Dart

by Alice Oswald

  under Still Pool Copse, on a saturday,

  slapping the water with bare hands, it’s fine once you’re in.

  Is it cold? Is it sharp?

  I stood looking down through beech trees.

  When I threw a stone I could count five before the splash.

  Then I jumped in a rush of gold to the head,

  through black and cold, red and cold, brown and warm,

  giving water the weight and size of myself in order to imagine it,

  water with my bones, water with my mouth and my understanding

  when my body was in some way a wave to swim in,

  one continuous fin from head to tail

  I steered through rapids like a canoe,

  digging my hands in, keeping just ahead of the pace of the river,

  thinking God I’m going fast enough already, what am I,

  spelling the shapes of the letters with legs and arms?

  S SSS W

  Slooshing the Water open and

  MMM

  for it Meeting shut behind me

  He dives, he shuts himself in a deep soft-bottomed silence

  which underwater is all nectarine, nacreous. He lifts

  the lid and shuts and lifts the lid and shuts and the sky

  jumps in and out of the world he loafs in.

  Far off and orange in the glow of it he drifts

  all down the Deer Park, into the dished and dangerous stones of old walls

  before the weirs were built, when the sea

  came wallowing wide right over these floodfed buttercups.

  Who’s this beside him? Twenty knights at arms

  capsized in full metal getting over the creeks;

  they sank like coins with the heads on them still conscious

  between water and steel trying to prize a little niche, a

  hesitation, a hiding-place, a breath, helplessly

  loosening straps with fingers metalled up, and the river

  already counting them into her bag, taking her tythe, ‘Dart Dart wants a heart’

  who now swim light as decayed spiderweb leaves.

  Poor Kathy Pellam and the scout from Deadman’s pool

  tangled in the river’s wires. There they lie

  like scratchmarks in a stack of glass,

  trapped under panes while he slides by

  through Folly Pool through Folly Stickle,

  hundreds of people hot from town with snorkels

  dinghies minnow jars briefs bikinis

  all slowly methodically swimming rid of their jobs.

  Now the blessing, the readiness of Christ

  be with all those who stare or fall into this river.

  May the water buoy them up, may God grant them

  extraordinary lifejacket lightness. And this child

  watching two salmon glooming through Boathouse Pool

  in water as high as heaven, spooked with yew trees

  and spokes of wetrot branches – Christ be there

  watching him watching, walking on this river. water abstractor

  and may He pull you out at Littlehempston, at the pumphouse, which is my patch, the world’s largest operational Sirofloc plant. Abstracting water for the whole Torbay area. That and Venford and the Spine Main

  (it’s August and a

  pendulum gladness swings just

  missing our heads by

  a millimetre the sun

  unwrappers the hedgerows full

  of sticky sweets and

  sucks and each hour

  the river alternates its

  minnows through various cubes)

  You don’t know what goes into water. Tiny particles of acids and salts. Cryptospiridion smaller than a fleck of talcom powder which squashes and elongates and bursts in the warmth of the gut. Everything is measured twice and we have stand-bys and shut-offs. This is what keeps you and me alive, this is the real work of the river

  This is the thirst that draws the soul, beginning

  at these three boreholes and radial collectors.

  Whatever pumps and gravitates and gathers

  in town reservoirs secretly can you follow it rushing

  under manholes in the straggle of the streets

  being gridded and channelled up

  even as he taps his screwdriver on a copper pipe

  and fills a glass. That this is the thirst that streaks

  his throat and chips away at his bones between lifting

  the glass and contact whatever sands the tongue,

  this draws his eyehole to this space among

  two thirds weight water and still swallowing.

  That now and then it puts him in a stare

  going over the tree-lit river in his car

  Jan Coo! Jan Coo!

  have you any idea what goes into water?

  I have verified the calibration records

  have you monitored for colour and turbidity?

  I’m continually sending light signals through it, my parameters are back to back

  was it offish? did you increase the magnetite?

  180 tonnes of it. I have bound the debris and skimmed the supernatant

  have you in so doing dealt with the black inert matter?

  in my own way. I have removed the finest particles

  did you shut down all inlets?

  I added extra chlorine

  have you countervailed against decay?

  have you created for us a feeling of relative invulnerability?

  I do my best. I walk under the rapid gravity filters, under the clarifier with the weight of all the water for the Torbay area going over me, it’s a lot for one man to carry on his shoulders.

  wave the car on, let him pass, he has

  sufficiently conducted himself under the pressure of self-repetition,

  tomorrow it continues with the dripdripdripdrip of samples,

  polyelectrolite and settlementation and twizzling scum and.

  Exhausted almost to a sitstill,

  letting the watergnats gather, for I am no longer the river meets the Seat at the foot of Totnes Weir

  able to walk except on a slope,

  I inch into the weir’s workplace,

  pace volume light dayshift nightshift

  water being spooled over, now

  my head is about to slide – furl up my eyes,

  give in to the crash of

  surrendering riverflesh falling, I

  come to in the sea I dream

  at the foot of the weir, out here asleep

  when the level fills and fills and covers the footpath,

  the stones go down, the little mounds of sand

  and sticks go down, the slatted walkway

  sways in flood, canoes glide among trees,

  trees wade, bangles of brash on branches,

  it fills, it rains, the moon

  spreads out floating above its sediment,

  and a child secretly sleepwalks

  under the frisky sound of the current

  out all night, closed in an egg of water

  (Sleep was at work and from the mind the mist a dreamer

  spread up like litmus to the moon, the rain

  hung glittering in mid-air when I came down

  and found a little patch of broken schist

  under the water’s trembling haste.

  It was so bright, I picked myself a slate

  as flat as a round pool and threw my whole

  thrust into it, as if to skim my soul.

  and nothing lies as straight as that stone’s route

  over the water’s wobbling light;

  it sank like a feather falls, not quite

  in full possession of its weight.

  I saw a sheet of seagulls suddenly

  flap and lift with a loud clap and up

  into the pain of flying, cry and croup

  and crowd the light as if in rivalry

  to peck the moon-bone empty

  then fall
all anyhow with arms spread out

  and feet stretched forwards to the earth again.

  They stood there like a flock of sleeping men

  with heads tucked in, surrendering to the night.

  whose forms from shoulder height

  sank like a feather falls, not quite

  in full possession of their weight.

  There one dreamed bare clothed only in his wings

  and one slept floating on his own reflection

  whose outline was a point without extension.

  At his wits’ end to find the flickerings

  of his few names and bones and things,

  someone stood shouting inarticulate

  descriptions of a shape that came and went

  all night under the soft malevolent

  rotating rain. and woke twice in a state

  of ecstasy to hear his shout

  sink like a feather falls, not quite

  in full possession of its weight.

  Tillworkers, thieves and housewives, all enshrined

  in sleep, unable to look round; night vagrants,

  prisoners on dream-bail, children without parents,

  free-trading, changing, disembodied, blind

  dreamers of every kind;

  even corpses, creeping disconsolate

  with tiny mouths, not knowing, still in tears,

  still in their own small separate atmospheres,

  rubbing the mould from their wet hands and feet

  and lovers in mid-flight

  all sank like a feather falls, not quite

  in full possession of their weight.

  And then I saw the river’s dream-self walk

  down to the ringmesh netting by the bridge

  to feel the edge of shingle brush the edge

  of sleep and float a world up like a cork

  out of its body’s liquid dark.

  Like in a waterfall one small twig caught

  catches a stick, a straw, a sack, a mesh

  of leaves, a fragile wickerwork of floodbrash,

  I saw all things catch and reticulate

  into this dreaming of the Dart

  that sinks like a feather falls, not quite

  in full possession of its weight)

  I wake wide in a swim of

  seagulls, scavengers, monomaniac, mad

  rubbish pickers, mating blatantly, screaming

  and slouch off scumming and flashing and hatching flies dairy worker (river water was originally used to cool the milk)

  to the milk factory, staring at routine things:

  looking down the glass lines: bottles on belts going round bends. Watching out for breakages, working nights. Building up prestige. Me with my hands under the tap, with my brain coated in a thin film of milk. In the fridge, in the warehouse, wearing ear-protectors.

  I’m in a rationalised set-up, a superplant. Everything’s stainless and risk can be spun off by centrifugal motion: blood, excrement, faecal matter from the farms

  have you forgotten the force that orders the world’s fields

  and sets all cities in their sites, this nomad

  pulling the sun and moon, placeless in all places,

  born with her stones, with her circular bird-voice,

  carrying everywhere her quarters?

  I’m in milk, 600,000,000 gallons a week.

  processing, separating, blending. Very precise quantities of raw milk added to skim, piped into silos, little screwed outlets pouring out milk to be sampled. Milk clarified milk homogenised and pasteurised and when it rains, the river comes under the ringmesh netting, full of non-potable water. All those pathogens and spoilage organisms! We have to think of our customers. We take pride in safety, we discard thirty bottles either side of a breakage. We’ve got weights and checks and trading standards

  and a duck’s nest in the leat with four blue eggs

  and all the latest equipment, all stainless steel so immaculate you can see your soul in it, in a hairnet, in white overalls and safety shoes.

  sewage worker

  It’s a rush, a sploosh of sewage, twenty thousand cubic metres being pumped in, stirred and settled out and wasted off, looped back, macerated, digested, clarified and returned to the river. I’m used to the idea. I fork the screenings out – a stink-mass of loopaper and whathaveyou, rags cottonbuds, you name it. I measure the intake through a flume and if there’s too much, I waste it off down the stormflow, it’s not my problem.

  When you think of all the milk we get from Unigate, fats and proteins and detergents foaming up and the rain and all the public sewers pumping in all day, it’s like a prisoner up to his neck in water in a cell with only a hand-pump to keep himself conscious, the whole place is always on the point of going under.

  So we only treat the primary flow, we keep it moving up these screws, we get the solids settled out and then push the activated sludge back through. Not much I can do.

  I walk on metal grilles above smelly water, I climb the ladder, I stand on a bridge above a brown lagoon, little flocs of sludge and clarified liquor spilling over the edge of the outer circle. The bridge is turning very slowly, sweeping the spill-off round and I’m thinking illicit sneaking thoughts – no one can see me up here, just me and machinery and tiny organisms.

  I’m in charge as far as Dartmoor, the metabolism of the whole South West, starting with clouds and flushing down through buildings and bodies into this underground grid of pipes, all ending up with me up here on my bridge – a flare of methane burning off blue at one end of the works and a culvert of clean water discharging out the other end, twenty BOD, nine ammonia, all the time, as and when

  It happened when oak trees were men

  when water was still water.

  There was a man, Trojan born,

  a footpad, a fighter:

  Brutus, grandson of Aeneas.

  But he killed his parents.

  He shut his heart and sailed away

  with a gang of exiled Trojans;

  a hundred down and outs the sea

  uninterestedly threw

  from one hand to the other, where

  to wash this numbness to?

  An island of undisturbed woods,

  rises in the waves,

  a great spire of birdsong

  out of a nave of leaves.

  There a goddess calls them,

  ‘Take aim, take heart,

  Trojans, you’ve got to sail

  till the sea meets the Dart.

  Where salmon swim with many a glittering

  and herons flare and fold,

  look for a race of freshwater

  filling the sea with gold.

  If you can dip your hand down

  and take a fish first go

  or lean out and pick an oyster

  while a seal stares at you,

  then steer your ships into its pull

  when the tide’s on the rise

  at full moon when the river

  grazes the skirts of the trees

  and row as far as Totnes

  and there get out and stand,

  outcasts of the earth, kings

  of the green island England.’

  Thirty days homeless on the sea,

  twelve paces, then turn,

  shacked in a lean-to ship,

  windlash and sunburn.

  Thirty days through a blue ring

  suspended above nothing,

  themselves and their flesh-troubled souls

  in sleep, twisting and soothing.

  They wake among landshapes,

  the jut-ends of continents

  foreign men with throats to slit;

  a stray rock full of cormorants.

  They sail into the grey-eyed rain,

  a race of freshwater

  fills the sea with flecks of peat,

  sparrows shoal and scatter.

  And when they dip their hands down

  they can touch the salmon,

  oyst
ers on either side,

  shelduck and heron.

  So they steer into its pull

  when the tide’s on the rise,

  at full moon when the river

  grazes the skirts of the trees.

  Silent round Dittisham bend,

  each pause of the oar

  they can hear the tiny sounds

  of river crabs on the shore.

  A fox at Stoke Gabriel,

  a seal at Duncannon,

  they sing round Sharpham bend

  among the jumping salmon.

  At Totnes, limping and swaying,

  they set foot on the land.

  There’s a giant walking towards them,

  a flat stone in each hand: stonewaller

  You get upriver stones and downriver stones. Beyond Totnes bridge and above Longmarsh the stones are horrible grey chunks, a waste of haulage, but in the estuary they’re slatey flat stones, much darker, maybe it’s to do with the river’s changes. Every beach has its own species, I can read them, volcanic, sedimentary, red sandstone, they all nest in the Dart, but it’s the rock that settles in layers and then flakes and cracks that gives me my flat walling stone.

  The estuary’s my merchant. I go pretty much the length and breadth of it scrudging stuff for some tiny stretch of wall, looking for the fault lines and the scabs of crystals and the natural coigns which are right-angled stones for corners.

  I’m struggling now to find the really lovely stones I dream of: maroon stones, perfect ellipses – but it’s not just stones, sometimes huge bits of wood with the texture of water still in them in the plane of movement, a kind of camber.

  I’ve made barns, sheds, chicken houses, goose huts, whatever I require, just putting two and two together, having a boat and a bit of space that needs squaring; which is how everything goes with me, because you see I’m a gatherer, an amateur, a scavenger, a comber, my whole style’s a stone wall, just wedging together what happens to be lying about at the time.