Dart (3 page)

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.

‘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

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

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

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?

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

(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)

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?

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:

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.

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