Every morning I bang my head against the wall, I let it shatter and slowly fill up with water. I’m prepared you see. I jog round the block, I go like hell and there’s the sea the whole of it measuring itself against my body, how strong am I? I can really run, I take steps two at a time, I salute the painted Britannia.
I’ve got the knack of fear, I’ve done two acquaints in a dinghy, just enough to get the feel of the wind, a hostile at the end of a rope. Would I float? If the hull was damaged, how long can I hold my breath?
the day the ship went down and five
policemen made a circle round
the sand and something half imagined
was born in blankets up the beach
all that day a dog was running
backwards forwards, shaking the water’s
feathers from its fur and down
the sea-front noone came for chips
and then the sun went out and almost
madly the Salvation Army’s
two strong women raised and tapped
their softest tambourines and someone
stared at the sea between his shoes
and I who had the next door grave
undressed without a word and lay
in darkness thinking of the sea
I remember when I was a boy rememberer
born not more than a mile from where I am now
a whole millennium going by in the form of a wave
Dad was pilot on the Dart
at two in the morning in a force nine gale
flashing a torch to lead her in
you can see the current sliding through that moment
over a thousand tons of ship plus cargo
the quay getting closer at full speed and at a certain pace
you get this pause superimposed on water I remember
two sisters, Mrs Allen and Mrs Fletcher
used to row the plums across from Dittisham
and one dawn there were seven crusader ships
in the same steady stream of wind
it isn’t easy to make out
in driving rain through water when you consider
your eyes are made mostly of movement
the cod fleet and the coal hulks and the bunkers from the Tyne and
a man sitting straight-up, reading a book in the bows while his Ship Was Sinking (Humphrey Gilbert)
but that was way back, when a chap made his living from his wits,
when I still had my parting in the middle and you could pull up
forty thousand pilchards in one draft
I stood here, I saw a whole flock of water migrating,
I saw two square-rigged barges carrying
deals, battens, scantling, lathwood
going out again with empty casks,
bags of trickling particles, bones, salts
Lew Bird, Stormy Croker, former pilots on the Dart
tiny spasms of time cross-fixed into water
and that same night, Dad took a merchant ship out
and left her at Castle ledge and she was bombed
and I saw the flames for hours up over that hill there crabbers
two brothers, both sea-fishers. Left school at fifteen and joined the supercrabbers, big boats working out of Dartmouth and when I say working
Say it’s stormy, you walk a thousand miles just to stand upright. Each crab pot seventy pounds and the end ones that weigh the net down about the weight of a washing machine, that’s twenty tonnes of gear per day and only five hours sleep. Plus it’s high risk. We were out in a hurricaine twenty miles off the Sillies.
No greenery – when you’re at sea it’s all sea. Then you head for Dartmouth and fifteen miles away you can smell the land, you smell silage, you see lights and fires. You’ve got a thousand pounds for a week’s work, you’ve got five days to enjoy yourself. I went mad, I sent my wife champagne in a taxi.
I taxi’d to Plymouth, gave the cabbie lunch and paid him to wait all day for me.
We got a reputation, smashing up the town a bit, what could we do? Age fifteen we were big money, it was like crabs were a free commodity, we could go on pulling them from the sea year after year, it was like a trap for cash. Not to mention what some crabbers pull up, they don’t always set their pots where the crabs are.
Ten years of that you pay for it with your body. Arthritis in the thumbs, elbows, knees, shoulders, back. A friend of ours died twice lifting pots, literally died, he had two heart attacks and got up again.
So now we’re rod-and-lining off small piss-pot boats and setting nets for whatever. Some days we don’t catch anything. Don’t catch don’t eat. Me and my dog went six days without food last winter.
But we’re fisherman, Matt, we won’t starve
Sid, we’re allergic
But tell me another job where you can see the whole sunrise every morning. No clocking in, no time bell. In summer you can dive in, see whales jumping, catch turtles the size of a dory. You slap your hands on the boatside and tell me another job where a dolphin spooks you, looks you straight in the eye and lets you touch him. You don’t know what you are till you’ve seen that
they start the boat, they climb
as if over the river’s vertebrae
out of its body into the wings of the sea
rounding the Mew Stone, the last bone of the Dart
where the shag stands criticising the weather
and rolls of seals haul out and scrabble away
and the seal-watcher on his wave-ski
shouts and waves and slowly paddles out of sight.
I steer my wave-ski into caves sealwatcher
horrible to enter alone
The fur, the hair, the fingernails, the bones.
Flick out the torch, the only thread between down here and daylight
and count five while the sea suckles and settles.
Self-maker, speaking its meaning over mine.
At low water
I swim up a dog-leg bend into the cliff,
the tide slooshes me almost to the roof
and float inwards into the trembling sphere
of one freshwater drip drip drip
where my name disappears and the sea slides in to replace it.
There the musky fishy genital smell
of things not yet actual: shivering impulses, shadows, propensities,
little amorous movements, quicksilver strainings and restrainings:
each winter they gather here,
twenty seals in this room behind the sea, all swaddled
and tucked in fat, like the soul in is cylinder of flesh.
With their grandmother mouths, with their dog-soft eyes, asking
who’s this moving in the dark? Me.
This is me, anonymous, water’s soliloquy,
all names, all voices, Slip-Shape, this is Proteus,
whoever that is, the shepherd of the seals,
driving my many selves from cave to cave …
About the Author
Alice Oswald lives in Devon and is married with three children. Dart, her second collection, won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002. Her third collection, Woods etc., was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the T. S. Eliot Prize. A Sleepwalk on the Severn appeared in 2009, as did Weeds and Wild Flowers, her collaboration with the artist Jessica Greenman.
In the Poetry Firsts collection
Simon Armitage – Kid
Wendy Cope – Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis
Philip Larkin – The Whitsun Weddings
Don Paterson – Nil Nil
Sylvia Plath – Ariel
Copyright
First published in 2002
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2010
All rights reserved
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� Alice Oswald, 2002
The right of Alice Oswald to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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ISBN 978–0–571–25942–7