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
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.