Read Dart for Free Online Page A

moor water.
    But the dredger’s got rid of those pools now. We tie up at Duncannon now.
    We go there after work, we dash down a cup of tea and a sandwich, then lie about chatting on the stones
    and we’re down the Checkers every Friday evening,
    saying nothing, playing yooker,
    in the bogs in twos and threes, sorting out the order of the River –
    You’re Mondays, you’re everything down from Am,
    my place is the blind spot under the bridge
    and if anyone else turns up, break their legs
    why is this jostling procession of waters,
    its many strands overclambering one another,
    so many word-marks, momentary traces
    in wind-script of the world’s voices,
    why is it so bragging and surrendering,
    love-making, spending, working and wandering,
    so stooping to look, so unstopping,
    so scraping and sharpening and smoothing and wrapping,
    why is it so sedulously clattering
    so like a man mechanically muttering
    so sighing, so endlessly seeking
    to hinge his fantasies to his speaking,
    all these scrambled and screw-like currents
    and knotty altercations of torrents,
    why is this interweaving form as contiguously gliding
    as two sisters, so entwined, so dividing,
    so caught in this dialogue that keeps
    washing into the cracks of their lips
    and spinning in the small hollows
    of their ears and egos
    this huge vascular structure
    why is this flickering water
    with its blinks and side-long looks
    with its language of oaks
    and clicking of its slatey brooks
    why is this river not ever
    able to leave until it’s over?
    Dartmouth and Kingsweir – ferryman
    two worlds, like two foxes in a wood,
    and each one can hear the wind-fractured
    closeness of the other.
    I work the car ferry, nudge it over with a pilot boat,
    backwards and forwards for twenty three years.
    Always on the way over – to or fro –
    and feeling inward for a certain sliding feeling
    that loosens the solidity of the earth,
    he makes himself a membrane through which everyone passes into elsewhere
    like a breath flutters its ghost across glass.
    I was working it the night the Penhilly lifeboat went down:
    soaking, terrified, frozen – the last man out on the river.
    But I never saw any ghosts. I came home drowning.
    I walked into the house and there was my beautiful red-haired wife,
    there wasn’t a man over twenty-five that didn’t fancy her.
    I think of her in autumn, when the trees go this amazing colour round Old Mill Creek.
    I go down there and switch off my engine.          Silence.
    After a while you hear the little sounds of the ebb.
    Or in winter, you can hear stalks of ice splintering under the boat.

    Wholly taken up with the detail to hand,
    he tunes his tiller, he rubs the winter between his fingers.
    On a good day, I can hear the wagtails over the engine.
    Or I’ll hear this cough like a gentleman in the water,
    I turn round and it’s a seal.
    Swift fragmentary happenings
    that ferry him between where things are now
    and why, disengaging his eyes from the question naval cadet
    twenty years old and I already know knots and lowering boats. I know radar and sonar, I can cross the gym without touching the floor. I can nearly handle a two-engine picket boat, turn it on a sixpence and bring it alongside.
    I’m officer-quality, I’ve been brutalised into courage. You could fire me from a frigate and I’d be a high-kill sea-skimming weapon, I’d hit the target standing to attention.
    I’ve got serious equipment in my head: derricks and davits, sea-pistols, fins and wings and noise signatures. When the Threat comes I’ll be up an hour before it with my boots bulled and my bed pulled up. Then down the path to Sandquay and encounter it whatever it is. I’ve got the gear and the capability.
    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,