Sienna's Reviews > Dart

listen,
a
lark
spinning
around
one
note
splitting
and
mending
it

*

he makes a little den of his smells and small thoughts

*

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.

*

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

*

she loves songs, she belongs to the soundmarks of larks

*

an old dandelion unpicks her shawl

*

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

*

maybe down-flowing water has an upcurrent nobody knows

*

in that brawl of mudwaves
the East Dart speaks Whiteslade and Babeny

the West Dart speaks a wonderful dark fall
from Cut Hill through Wystman's Wood

put your ear to it, you can hear water
cooped up in moss and moving

slowly uphill through lean-to trees
where every day the sun gets twisted and shut

with the weak sound of the wind
rubbing one indolent twig upon another

*

when the lithe Water turns
and its tongue flatters the ferns
do you speak this kind of sound:
whirlpool whisking round?

*

Trees like that, when they fall the whole place feels different, different air, different creatures entering the gap. I saw two roe deer wandering through this morning. And then the wind's got its foot in and singles out the weaklings, drawn up old coppice stems that've got no branches to give them balance. I generally leave the deadwood lying. They say all rivers were once fallen trees.

*

I can outcanoevre you

*

tufting felting hanks tops spindles slubbings
hoppers and rollers and slatted belts
bales of carded wool the colour of limestone
and wool puffs flying through tubes distributed by cyclones
wool in the back of the throat, wool on ledges,
in fields and spinning at 5,000 rotations per minute —
and look how quickly a worker can mend an end
what tentacular fingers moving like a spider,
splicing it invisibly neat look what fingers could be —

*

all day my voice is being washed away

*

if I shout out,
if I shout in,
I am only as wide
as a word's aperture

*

a hesitation, a hiding-place

*

May the water buoy them up, may God grant them
extraordinary lifejacket lightness. And this child
watching two salmon glooming through Boathouse Pool
in water as high as heaven, spooked with yew trees
and spokes of wetrot branches — Christ be there
watching him watching, walking on this river.

*

this is the thirst that streaks
his throat and chips away at his bones

*

have you countervailed against decay?
have you created for us a feeling of relative invulnerability?

*

They stood there like a flock of sleeping men
with heads tucked in, surrendering to the night.
whose forms from shoulder height
sank like a feather falls, not quite
in full possession of their weight.

There one dreamed bare clothed only in his wings
and one slept floating on his own reflection
whose outline was a point without extension.
At his wits' end to find the flickerings
of his few names and bones and things,
something stood shouting inarticulate
descriptions of a shape that came and went
all night under the soft malevolent
rotating rain. and woke twice in a state
of ecstasy to hear his shout
sink like a feather falls, not quite
in full possession of its weight.

Tillworkers, thieves and housewives, all enshrined
in sleep, unable to look round; night vagrants,
prisoners on dream-bail, children without parents,
free-trading, changing, disembodied, blind
dreamers of every kind;
even corpses, creeping disconsolate
with tiny mouths, not knowing, still in tears,
still in their own small separate atmospheres,
rubbing the mould from their wet hands and feet
and lovers in mid-flight
all sank like a feather falls, not quite
in full possession of their weight.

*

have you forgotten the force that orders the world's fields
and sets all cities in their sites, this nomad
pulling the sun and moon, placeless in all places,
born with her stones, with her circular bird-voice,
carrying everywhere her quarters?

I'm in milk, 600,000,000 gallons a week.

*

It happened when oak trees were men
when water was still water.

*

They wake among landshapes,
the jut-ends of continents
foreign men with throats to slit;
a stray rock full of cormorants.

*

A tree-line, a slip-lane, a sight-line, an eye-hole

*

like a ship the shape of flight
or like the weight that keeps it upright

*

Feel this rain.
The only light's
the lichen tinselling the trees.
And when it's gone, Flat Owers

is ours. We mouth our joy.
Oysters, out of sight of sound.
A million rippled
life-masks of the river.

*

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?

*

two worlds, like two foxes in a wood,
and each one can hear the wind-fractured
closeness of the other.

*

he makes himself a membrane through which everyone passes into elsewhere
like a breath flutters its ghost across glass.

*

I've been brutalised into courage.

*

Self-maker, speaking its meaning over mine.