Free Dart by Alice Oswald Page B

not make time
    to see if there’s an eel come up the stream
    I let time go as slow as moss, I stand
    and try to get the dragonflies to land
    their gypsy-coloured engines on my hand)
    whose voice is this who’s talking in my larynx
    who’s in my privacy under my stone tent
    where I live slippershod in my indoor colours
    who’s talking in my lights-out where I pull to
    under the bent body of an echo are these your
    fingers in my roof are these your splashes
    Everyone converges on bridges, bank holidays it fills up with cars, people set up tables in the reeds, but a mile either side you’re back into wilderness. ( Twelve horses clattering away .) and there’s the dipper bobbing up and down like a man getting ready, hitching his trousers. I’m crouching, I never let my reflection fall on water,
    I depend on being not noticed, which keeps me small and rather nimble, I can swim miles naked with midges round my head, watching wagtails, I’m soft, I’m an otter streaking from the headwaters, I run overland at night, I watch badgers, I trespass, don’t say anything, I’ve seen waternymphs, I’ve seen tiny creatures flying, trapped, intermarrying, invisible
    upriver creatures born into this struggle against
    water out of balance being swept away
    mouthparts clinging to mosses
    round streamlined creatures born into vanishing
    between golden hide-outs, trout at the mercy of rush
    quiver to keep still always
    swimming up through it hiding
    freshwater shrimps driven flat in this struggle against
    haste pitching through stones
    things suck themselves to rocks
    things swinging from side to side
    leak out a safety line to a leaf and
    grip for dear life a sandgrain or gravel for ballast
    thrown into this agony of being swept away
    with ringing everywhere though everything is also silent
    the spider of the rapids running over the repeated note
    of disorder and rhythm in collision, the simulacrum fly
    spinning a shelter of silk among the stones
    and all the bright-feathered flies of the fishermen, indignant under the waterfall, in waders, getting their feet into position to lean over and move the world: medics, milkmen, policemen, millionaires, cheering themselves up with the ratchet and swish of their lines fisherman and bailiff
    I’ve payed fifty pounds to fish here and I fish like hell, I know the etiquette – who wades where – and I know the dark places under stones where things are moving. I caught one thirteen pounds atBelever, huge, silvery, maybe seven times back from the sea, now the sea-trout, he’s canny, he’ll keep to his lie till you’ve gone, you have to catch him at night.
    Which is where the law comes in, the bailiff, as others see me, as I see myself when I wake, finding myself in this six-foot fourteen-stone of flesh with letters after my name, in boots, in a company vehicle, patrolling from the headwaters to the weir, with all my qualified faculties on these fish.
    When the owls are out up at Newtake. You cast behind and then forwards in two actions. Casting into darkness for this huge, it’s like the sea’s right there underneath you, this invisible
    now I know my way round darkness, I’ve got night vision, I’ve been up here in the small hours waiting for someone to cosh me but
    it’s not frightening if you know what you’re doing. There’s a sandbar, you can walk on it right across the weirpool but
    I hooked an arm once, petrified, slowly pulling a body up, it was only a cardigan
    but when you’re onto a salmon,
    a big one hiding under a rock, you can see his tail making the water move,
    you let the current work your fly
    all the way from Iceland, from the Faroes,
    a three-sea-winter fish coming up on the spate,
    on the full moon, when the river spreads out
    a thousand feet between Holne and Dartmeet and he climbs it,
    up the trickiest line, maybe
    maybe down-flowing water has an upcurrent nobody knows

    it takes your