Dart Read Online Free Page B

earth again.
    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,
    someone 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.
    And then I saw the river’s dream-self walk
    down to the ringmesh netting by the bridge
    to feel the edge of shingle brush the edge
    of sleep and float a world up like a cork
    out of its body’s liquid dark.
    Like in a waterfall one small twig caught
    catches a stick, a straw, a sack, a mesh
    of leaves, a fragile wickerwork of floodbrash,
    I saw all things catch and reticulate
    into this dreaming of the Dart
    that sinks like a feather falls, not quite
    in full possession of its weight)
    I wake wide in a swim of
    seagulls, scavengers, monomaniac, mad

    rubbish pickers, mating blatantly, screaming
    and slouch off scumming and flashing and hatching flies dairy worker (river water was originally used to cool the milk)
    to the milk factory, staring at routine things:
    looking down the glass lines: bottles on belts going round bends. Watching out for breakages, working nights. Building up prestige. Me with my hands under the tap, with my brain coated in a thin film of milk. In the fridge, in the warehouse, wearing ear-protectors.
    I’m in a rationalised set-up, a superplant. Everything’s stainless and risk can be spun off by centrifugal motion: blood, excrement, faecal matter from the farms
    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.
    processing, separating, blending. Very precise quantities of raw milk added to skim, piped into silos, little screwed outlets pouring out milk to be sampled. Milk clarified milk homogenised and pasteurised and when it rains, the river comes under the ringmesh netting, full of non-potable water. All those pathogens and spoilage organisms! We have to think of our customers. We take pride in safety, we discard thirty bottles either side of a breakage. We’ve got weights and checks and trading standards
    and a duck’s nest in the leat with four blue eggs
    and all the latest equipment, all stainless steel so immaculate you can see your soul in it, in a hairnet, in white overalls and safety shoes.
    sewage worker
    It’s a rush, a sploosh of sewage, twenty thousand cubic metres being pumped in, stirred and settled out and wasted off, looped back, macerated, digested, clarified and returned to the river. I’m used to the idea. I fork the screenings out – a stink-mass of loopaper and whathaveyou, rags cottonbuds, you name it. I measure the intake through a flume and if there’s too much, I waste it off down the stormflow, it’s not my problem.
    When you think of all the milk we get from Unigate, fats and proteins and detergents foaming up and the rain and all