Dart (2 page)
Authors: Alice Oswald
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 Hillâ 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
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 â 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
âDart 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 â 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 pools 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: âonce
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
âI 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 â¦'
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?
