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which water strives to attain a spherical drop-form’
    wound onto reels and packed into bales
    tied with polypropylene and cling film to keep it dry on the sea.
    all day my voice is being washed away at Staverton Ford, John Edmunds being washed away, 1840
    out of a lapse in my throat

    like after rain
    little trails of soil-creep
    loosen into streams
    if I shout out,
    if I shout in,
    I am only as wide
    as a word’s aperture
    but listen! if you listen
    I will move you a few known sounds
    in a constant irregular pattern:
    flocks of foxgloves spectating slightly bending …
    o I wish I was slammicking home
    in wet clothes, shrammed with cold and bivvering but
    this is my voice
    under the spickety leaves,
    under the knee-nappered trees
    rustling in its cubby-holes
    and rolling me round, like a container
    upturned and sounded through
    and the silence pouring into what’s left maybe eighty seconds

silence
    silence
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Menyahari – we scream in mid-air. swimmer
    We jump from a tree into a pool, we change ourselves
    into the fish dimension. Everybody swims here
    under Still Pool Copse, on a saturday,
    slapping the water with bare hands, it’s fine once you’re in.
    Is it cold? Is it sharp?
    I stood looking down through beech trees.
    When I threw a stone I could count five before the splash.
    Then I jumped in a rush of gold to the head,
    through black and cold, red and cold, brown and warm,
    giving water the weight and size of myself in order to imagine it,
    water with my bones, water with my mouth and my understanding

    when my body was in some way a wave to swim in,
    one continuous fin from head to tail
    I steered through rapids like a canoe,
    digging my hands in, keeping just ahead of the pace of the river,
    thinking God I’m going fast enough already, what am I,
    spelling the shapes of the letters with legs and arms?
                   S SSS                     W
     
     
                       Slooshing the Water open and
     
              MMM
     
              for it Meeting shut behind me
     
    He dives, he shuts himself in a deep soft-bottomed silence
    which underwater is all nectarine, nacreous. He lifts
    the lid and shuts and lifts the lid and shuts and the sky
    jumps in and out of the world he loafs in.
    Far off and orange in the glow of it he drifts
    all down the Deer Park, into the dished and dangerous stones of old walls
    before the weirs were built, when the sea
    came wallowing wide right over these floodfed buttercups.
    Who’s this beside him? Twenty knights at arms
    capsized in full metal getting over the creeks;
    they sank like coins with the heads on them still conscious
    between water and steel trying to prize a little niche, a
    hesitation, a hiding-place, a breath, helplessly

    loosening straps with fingers metalled up, and the river
    already counting them into her bag, taking her tythe, ‘Dart Dart wants a heart’
    who now swim light as decayed spiderweb leaves.
    Poor Kathy Pellam and the scout from Deadman’s pool
    tangled in the river’s wires. There they lie
    like scratchmarks in a stack of glass,
    trapped under panes while he slides by
    through Folly Pool through Folly Stickle,
    hundreds of people hot from town with snorkels
    dinghies minnow jars briefs bikinis
    all slowly methodically swimming rid of their jobs.
    Now the blessing, the readiness of Christ
    be with all those who stare or fall into this river.
    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. water abstractor
    and may He pull you out at Littlehempston, at the pumphouse, which is my patch, the world’s largest operational Sirofloc plant. Abstracting