Free Dart by Alice Oswald

Who’s this moving alive over the moor?
    Who’s this moving alive over the moor?
    An old man seeking and finding a difficulty.
    Has he remembered his compass his spare socks
    does he fully intend going in over his knees off the military track from Okehampton?
    keeping his course through the swamp spaces
    and pulling the distance around his shoulders the source of the Dart – Cranmere Pool on Dartmoor, seven miles from the nearest road
    and if it rains, if it thunders suddenly
    where will he shelter looking round
    and all that lies to hand is his own bones?
    tussocks, minute flies,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  wind, wings, roots
    He consults his map. A huge rain-coloured wilderness.
    This must be the stones, the sudden movement,
    the sound of frogs singing in the new year.
    Who’s this issuing from the earth?
    The Dart, lying low in darkness calls out Who is it?
    trying to summon itself by speaking … the walker replies
    An old man, fifty years a mountaineer, until my heart gave out,
    so now I’ve taken to the moors. I’ve done all the walks, the Two
    Moors Way, the Tors, this long winding line the Dart
    this secret buried in reeds at the beginning of sound I
    won’t let go of man, under
    his soakaway ears and his eye ledges working
    into the drift of his thinking, wanting his heart
    I keep you folded in my mack pocket and I’ve marked in red
    where the peat passes are and the good sheep tracks

    cow-bones, tin-stones, turf-cuts.
    listen to the horrible keep-time of a man walking,
    rustling and jingling his keys
    at the centre of his own noise,
    clomping the silence in pieces and I
    I don’t know, all I know is walking. Get dropped off the military track from Oakehampton and head down into Cranmere pool. It’s dawn, it’s a huge sphagnum kind of wilderness, and an hour in the morning is worth three in the evening. You can hear plovers whistling, your feet sink right in, it’s like walking on the bottom of a lake.
    What I love is one foot in front of another. South-south-west and down the contours. I go slipping between Black Ridge and White Horse Hill into a bowl of the moor where echoes can’t get out
    listen,
    a
    lark
    spinning
    around
    one
    note
    splitting
    and
    mending
    it
    and I find you in the reeds, a trickle coming out of a bank, a foal of a river
    one step-width water
    of linked stones
    trills in the stones
    glides in the trills
    eels in the glides
    in each eel a fingerwidth of sea
    in walking boots, with twenty pounds on my back: spare socks, compass, map, water purifier so I can drink from streams, seeing the cold floating spread out above the morning,
    tent, torch, chocolate, not much else.
    Which’ll make it longish, almost unbearable between my evening meal and sleeping, when I’ve got as far as stopping, sitting in the tent door with no book, no saucepan, not so much as a stick to support the loneliness
    he sits clasping his knees, holding his face low down between them,
    he watches black slugs,
    he makes a little den of his smells and small thoughts
    he thinks up a figure far away on the tors
    waving, so if something does happen,
    if night comes down and he has to leave the path
    then we’ve seen each other, somebody knows where we are.
    falling back on appropriate words
    turning the loneliness in all directions …
    through Broadmarsh,             under Cut Hill,
    Sandyhole, Sittaford, Hartyland, Postbridge,
    Belever, Newtake, Dartmeet, the whole
    unfolding emptiness branching and reaching
    and bending over itself.
    I met a man sevenish by the river
    where it widens under the main road
    and adds a strand strong enough
    to break branches and bend back necks.
    Rain. Not much of a morning.
    Routine work, getting the buckets out
    and walking up the cows – I know you,
    Jan Coo. A Wind on a deep pool. Jan Coo: his name means So-and-So of the Woods, he haunts the dark.
    Cows know him, looking for the fork