Dart

by Alice Oswald

  I love this concept of drift, meaning driven, deposited by a current of air or water. Like how I came by the boat, someone just phoned and said I’ve got this eighteen-foot crabber and one thing led to another. Here I am now with a clinker-built launch.

  But it’s off the river at the moment, it gets a lot of wear and tear going aground on hard rocks and carrying a tonnage of stone around. I haven’t worked it for six months, hence my agitated state, I keep looking over my shoulder, I dream my skin’s flaking off and silting up the house; because the boat’s my aerial, my instrument, connects me into the texture of things, as I keep saying, the grain, the drift of water which I couldn’t otherwise get a hold on.

  A tree-line, a slip-lane, a sight-line, an eye-hole, whatever it is, when you’re chugging past Sharpham on a fine evening, completely flat, the water just glows. You get this light different from anything on land, as if you’re keeping a different space, you’re in a more wobbly element like a wheelbarrow, you can feel the whole earth tipping, the hills shifting up and down, shedding stones as if everything’s a kind of water

  Oceanides Atlanta Proserpina Minerva boat voices

  yachts with their river-shaking engines

  Lizzie of Lymington Doris of Dit’sum

  bending the firey strands under their keels, sheathed in the flying fields and fleeing the burden of being

  two sailing boats, like prayers towing their wooden tongues

  Naini Tal, Nereid of Quarr

  and the sailmaker grabbing his sandwich,

  the rich man bouncing his powerboat like a gym shoe,

  the boatyard manager, thriving in the narrow margin between storing boats and keeping them moving, costing and delegating, structuring deals and wrapping up proposals

  the shipwright, the caulker, the countersunk copper nail

  there goes the afternoon, faster than the rowers breathe, they lever and spring

  and a skiff flies through like a needle worked loose from its compass

  under the arch where Mick luvs Trudi

  and Jud’s heart

  has the arrow locked through it

  six corn-blue dinghies banging together

  Liberty Belle, Easily Led, Valentine, L’Amour, White Rose and Fanny

  and there goes Westerly Corsair Golden Cloud and Moonfire

  Windweaver Sunshadow Seawolf

  in the shine of a coming storm when the kiosk is closed

  and gulls line up and gawp on the little low wall

  there goes a line of leaves, there goes winter there goes the river at the speed of the woods coming into flower a little slower than the heron a little slower than a make-do boat running to heel with only a few galvanised bits and a baler between you and your watery soul

  there goes spring, there goes the lad from Kevicks

  sailing to New Zealand in a tiny catamaran to find his girlfriend,

  a wave washes out his stove, he’s eating pasta soaked in seawater

  and by the time he gets there she’s with someone else

  Troll, Fluff, Rank, Bruckless,

  Bootle Bumtrink, Fisher 25,

  Tester, Pewter, Whistler, Smiler

  Jezail, Saith Seren, Pianola, Windfola,

  Nanuk, Callooh, Shereefah

  it’s taken twenty years, boatbuilder

  every bit of spare cash,

  it started as a dream, I did some sketches,

  I had to build myself a shed to make it in

  Freeby

  Moody

  Loopy Lou

  every roll of fibre glass two hundred quid, it has to be sandwiched round foam and resined, the whole thing rubbed over with powdered glass and sanded by hand, but you can make fantastic shapes: eighteen drawers in the galley not one the same size, two rudders – you could sell them to the Tate

  Checkmate Knot Shore

  now if this was a wooden boat you’d have to steam the planks, they used to peg them on the tide line to get salt into the timber; you can still see grown oak boats, where you cut the bilge beams straight out of the trees, keeping the line sweet, fairing it by eye, it’s a different mindset – when I was a boy all boats leaked like a basket, if you were sailing you were bailing

  Merry Fiddler Music Maker Island Life Fiesta

  but give us a couple more years we’ll be out of here, in the Med, soaking up the sun, lying on the netting watching dolphins, swapping a boatnail for a fish, we’ll be away from all these cars, all this rain, that’s what the dream is that’s what this boat is – for twenty years now our only way out’s been building it

  like a ship the shape of flight

  or like the weight that keeps it upright

  or like a skyline crossed by breath

  or like the planking bent beneath

  or like a glint or like a gust

  or like the lofting of a mast

  such am I who flits and flows

  and seeks and serves and swiftly goes –

  the ship sets sail, the weight is thrown,

  the skyline shifts, the planks groan,

  the glint glides, the gust shivers

  the mast sways and so does water

  then like a wave the flesh of wind

  or like the flow-veins on the sand

  or like the inkling of a fish

  or like the phases of a splash

  or like an eye or like a bone

  or like a sandflea on a stone

  such am I who flits and flows

  and seeks and serves and swiftly goes –

  the wave slides in, the sand lifts,

  the fish fades, the splash drifts,

  the eye blinks, the bone shatters,

  the sandflea jumps and so does water

  Back in the days when I was handsome and the river was just river – salmon netsman and poacher

  not all these buoys everywhere that trip your net so that you’ve

  got to cut the headrope and the mesh goes fshoo like a zip. Terrifying.

  And there was so many salmon you could sit up to your knees in

  dead fish keeping your legs warm.

  I used to hear the tramp tramp tramp under my window of men

  going down to the boats at three in the morning.

  Low water, dead calm.

  You don’t know what goes on down there.

  You go to bed, you switch out the light.

  There’s three of us in the pub with our hands shaking:

  Have a beer mate, you’re going out …

  We daren’t say anything, they can guess what we’re onto

  because the adrenalin’s up and we’re

  jumping about like sea trout eeeeeeeeeee

  I haven’t calmed down since a week ago,

  I was standing under a sheer wall

  with a bailiff above me flashing his torch over the river.

  I put my hand up and touched his boot

  and it’s making my hair fall out remembering it.

  Drink up now. Last orders. Low water. Dead calm.

  When the sun goes down the wind drops.

  It’s so quiet you could fall asleep at the paddles.

  That’s when you can hear them jumping –

  slap slap – you’ve got to be onto it.

  I had a dog once who could sense a salmon.

  That’s your legal fisherman, he’s watching and listening,

  he’s got a seine net and he hauls out from the shore and

  back in a curve, like this.

  But more than likely he’s got a legal right hand and a

  rogue left hand and when he’s out left-handed,

  he just rows a mesh net straight across the river – a bloody wall.

  In twenty minutes he’s covered the cost of the net,

  in an hour he’s got a celebration coming.

  That’s where the crack is, that’s when fishing pays.

  Or if it’s dawn or nightfall, the river’s the weird colour of the sky,

  you can see a voler as much as two
miles away.

  That’s the unique clean line a salmon makes in water

  and you make a speckle for which way he’s heading.

  Your ears are twitching for the bailiff,

  the car engine, the rustle in the bushes.

  Bam! Lights come on, you ditch the net –

  stop running, x, we know who you are.

  There’s a scuffle. The skill’s to time it right, to row out

  fast and shoot your net fast over the stern,

  a risky operation when you’re leaning out and the boat wobbles –

  I saw a man fallover the edge once:

  oo oo oooo …

  Our boat went under between the wharf and steamer quay.

  We’d got weights on board, more than you’re meant to

  and we were all three of us in the water. One drowned.

  It’s a long story, you’ve got to judge the tide

  You’ve got to judge the tide precisely, you draw a semicircle back to land.

  One man’s up there pulling the net in, knuckles to ground, so the catch doesn’t spill out under,

  which is hard work till it gets to the little eddy offshore and then the river gathers it in for you.

  You can see them in the bunt of the net torpedoing round.

  Sometimes a salmon’ll smack your arm a significant knock, so you pull it right up the mud.

  Some people would perceive it dangerous, but we know what we’re doing,

  even when it’s mud up to our thighs, we know the places where the dredger’s taken the sand away

  Foul black stuff, if you got out there you might well disappear

  and people do die in this river.

  Three men on an oystering expedition,

  the tide flowing in, the wind coming down,

  on a wide bit of the river.

  They filled the boat too full, they all drowned.

  Where are you going? Flat Owers. oyster gatherers

  Who’s Owers? Ours.

  A paddock of sand mid-river

  two hours either side of low water.

  Can I come over?

  All kinds of weather

  when the wind spins you round

  in your fish-tin boat with its four-stroke engine.

  Who lives here?

  Who dies here?

  Only oysters and often

  the quartertone quavers of an oyster-catcher.

  Keep awake‚ keep listening.

  The tide comes in fast

  and after a while it

  looks like you’re standing on the water

  still turning and shaking your oyster bags.

  Already the sea taste

  wets and sways the world – what now?

  Now back to the river.

  Feel this rain.

  The only light’s

  the lichen tinselling the trees.

  And when it’s gone, Flat Owers

  is ours. We mouth our joy.

  Oysters, out of sight of sound.

  A million rippled

  life-masks of the river.

  I thought it was a corpse once when I had a seal in the net – huge – a sea lion.

  They go right up to the weir.

  They hang around by the catch waiting for a chance.

  That’s nothing – I almost caught a boat once.

  On an S-bend. Not a sound.

  Pitch dark, waiting for the net to fill, then

  BOOM BOOM BOOM – a pleasure boat

  with full disco comes flashing round the corner.

  What you call a panic bullet –

  ten seconds to get the net in,

  two poachers pulling like mad

  in slow motion strobe lights

  and one man, pissed, leans over the side and says

  hellooooooooooooo?

  But if you’re lucky, at the last knockings it’s a salmon with his

  great hard bony nose –

  you hit him with a napper and he goes on twitching in the boat

  asking for more, more to come, more salmon to come.

  But there aren’t many more these days. They get caught off

  Greenland in the monofilaments.

  That’s why we’re cut-throats on weekdays.

  We have been known to get a bit fisticuffs –

  boats have been sunk, nets set fire.

  Once I waited half an hour and

  hey what’s happening, some tosser’s poaching the stretch below me,

  so I leg it downriver and make a bailiff noise in the bushes

  And if you find a poacher’s net, you just get out your pocket knife and shred it like you were ripping his guts.

  whose side are you on?

  I’ve grown up on this river,

  I look after this river,

  what’s your business?

  beating the other boats to the best places:

  sandy pools up Sharpham where the salmon holds back to rub the sea-lice off his belly.

  He’ll hold back waiting for the pressure of water

  or maybe it’s been raining and washed oil off the roads or nitrates and God knows what else

  and he doesn’t like his impressions up the weir.

  Some days the river’s dark black – that’s the moor water.

  But the dredger’s got rid of those pools now. We tie up at Duncannon now.

  We go there after work, we dash down a cup of tea and a sandwich, then lie about chatting on the stones

  and we’re down the Checkers every Friday evening,

  saying nothing, playing yooker,

  in the bogs in twos and threes, sorting out the order of the River –

  You’re Mondays, you’re everything down from Am,

  my place is the blind spot under the bridge

  and if anyone else turns up, break their legs

  why is this jostling procession of waters,

  its many strands overclambering one another,

  so many word-marks, momentary traces

  in wind-script of the world’s voices,

  why is it so bragging and surrendering,

  love-making, spending, working and wandering,

  so stooping to look, so unstopping,

  so scraping and sharpening and smoothing and wrapping,

  why is it so sedulously clattering

  so like a man mechanically muttering

  so sighing, so endlessly seeking

  to hinge his fantasies to his speaking,

  all these scrambled and screw-like currents

  and knotty altercations of torrents,

  why is this interweaving form as contiguously gliding

  as two sisters, so entwined, so dividing,

  so caught in this dialogue that keeps

  washing into the cracks of their lips

  and spinning in the small hollows

  of their ears and egos

  this huge vascular structure

  why is this flickering water

  with its blinks and side-long looks

  with its language of oaks

  and clicking of its slatey brooks

  why is this river not ever

  able to leave until it’s over?

  Dartmouth and Kingsweir – ferryman

  two worlds, like two foxes in a wood,

  and each one can hear the wind-fractured

  closeness of the other.

  I work the car ferry, nudge it over with a pilot boat,

  backwards and forwards for twenty three years.

  Always on the way over – to or fro –

  and feeling inward for a certain sliding feeling

  that loosens the solidity of the earth,

  he makes himself a membrane through which everyone passes into elsewhere

  like a breath flutters its ghost across glass.

  I was working it the night the Penhilly lifeboat went down:

  soaking, terrified, frozen – the last man out on the river.

  But I never saw any ghosts. I came
home drowning.

  I walked into the house and there was my beautiful red-haired wife,

  there wasn’t a man over twenty-five that didn’t fancy her.

  I think of her in autumn, when the trees go this amazing colour round Old Mill Creek.

  I go down there and switch off my engine. Silence.

  After a while you hear the little sounds of the ebb.

  Or in winter, you can hear stalks of ice splintering under the boat.

  Wholly taken up with the detail to hand,

  he tunes his tiller, he rubs the winter between his fingers.

  On a good day, I can hear the wagtails over the engine.

  Or I’ll hear this cough like a gentleman in the water,

  I turn round and it’s a seal.

  Swift fragmentary happenings

  that ferry him between where things are now

  and why, disengaging his eyes from the question naval cadet

  twenty years old and I already know knots and lowering boats. I know radar and sonar, I can cross the gym without touching the floor. I can nearly handle a two-engine picket boat, turn it on a sixpence and bring it alongside.

  I’m officer-quality, I’ve been brutalised into courage. You could fire me from a frigate and I’d be a high-kill sea-skimming weapon, I’d hit the target standing to attention.

  I’ve got serious equipment in my head: derricks and davits, sea-pistols, fins and wings and noise signatures. When the Threat comes I’ll be up an hour before it with my boots bulled and my bed pulled up. Then down the path to Sandquay and encounter it whatever it is. I’ve got the gear and the capability.