Free Dart by Alice Oswald Page A

in 
    They know the truth of him – a strange man –
    I’m soaked, fuck these numb hands.
    A tremor in the woods. A salmon under a stone.
    I know who I am, I
    come from the little heap of stones up by Postbridge, Postbridge is the where first road crosses the Dart
    you’ll have seen me feeding the stock, you can tell it’s me
    because of the wearing action of water on bone.
    Oh I’m slow and sick, I’m
    trying to talk myself round to leaving this place,
    but there’s roots growing round my mouth, my foot’s
    in a rusted tin. One night I will.
    And so one night he sneaks away downriver,
    told us he could hear voices woooo
    we know what voices means, Jan Coo Jan Coo.
    A white feather on the water keeping dry.
    Next morning it came home to us he was drowned.
    He should never have swum on his own.
    Now he’s so thin you can see the light
    through his skin, you can see the filth in his midriff.
    Now he’s the groom of the Dart – I’ve seen him
    taking the shape of the sky, a bird, a blade,
    a fallen leaf, a stone – may he lie long
    in the inexplicable knot of the river’s body chambermaid
    in a place of bracken and scattered stone piles and cream teas in the tourist season, comes the chambermaid unlocking every morning with her peach-soap hands: Only me, Room-Cleaning, number twenty-seven, an old couple – he’s blind, she’s in her nineties. They come every month walking very slowly to thewaterfall. She guides him, he props her. She sees it, he hears it. Gently resenting each other’s slowness: (Where are we turning you are tending to slide is it mud what is that long word meaning burthensome it’s as if mud was issuing from ourselves don’t step on the trefoil listen a lark going up in the dark would you sshhhhh?) Brush them away, squirt everything, bleach and vac and rubberglove them into a bin-bag, please do not leave toenails under the rugs, a single grey strand in the basin
    shhh I can make myself invisible Naturalist
    with binoculars in moist places. I can see frogs
    hiding under spawn – water’s sperm – whisper, I wear soft colours
    whisper, this is the naturalist
    she’s been out since dawn
    dripping in her waterproof notebook
    I’m hiding in red-brown grass all different lengths, bog bean, sundew, I get excited by its wetness, I watch spiders watching aphids, I keep my eyes in crevices, I know two secret places, call them x and y where the Large Blue Butterflies are breeding, it’s lovely, the male chasing the female, frogs singing lovesongs
    she loves songs, she belongs to the soundmarks of larks
    I knew a heron once, when it got up
    its wings were the width of the river,
    I saw it eat an eel alive
    and the eel the eel chewed its way back inside out through the heron’s stomach
    like when I creep through bridges right in along a ledge to see where the dippers nest.
    Going through holes, I love that, the last thing through here was an otter
    (two places I’ve Seen eels, bright Whips of flow by the bridge, an eel watcher
    like stopper waves the rivercurve slides through
    trampling around at first you just make out
    the elver movement of the running sunlight
    three foot under the road-judder you hold
    and breathe contracted to an eye-quiet world
    while an old dandelion unpicks her shawl
    and one by one the small spent oak flowers fall
    then gently lift a branch brown tag and fur
    on every stone and straw and drifting burr
    when like a streamer from your own eye’s iris
    a kingfisher spurts through the bridge whose axis
    is endlessly in motion as each wave
    photos its flowing to the bridge’s curve
    if you can keep your foothold, snooping down
    then suddenly two eels let go get thrown
    tumbling away downstream looping and linking
    another time we scooped a net through sinking
    silt and gold and caught one strong as bike-chain
    stared for a while then let it back again
    I never pass that place and