Dart (4 page)
Authors: Alice Oswald
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,
oysters 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.
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
.