Stealing Trout on a May Morning

I park the car half in the ditch and switch off and sit.

The hot astonishment of my engine’s arrival

Sinks through 5 a.m. silence and frost.

At the end of a long gash

An atrocity through the lace of first light

I sit with the reeking instrument.

I am on delicate business.

I want the steel to be cold instantly

And myself secreted three fields away

And the farms, back under their blankets, supposing a plane passed.

Because this is no wilderness you can just rip into.

Every leaf is plump and well-married,

Every grain of soil of known lineage, well-connected.

And the gardens are like brides fallen asleep

Before their weddings have properly begun.

The orchards are the hushed maids, fresh from convent …

It is too hushed, something improper is going to happen.

It is too ghostly proper, all sorts of liveried listenings

Tiptoe along the lanes and peer over hedges.

I listen for the eyes jerked open on pillows,

Their dreams washed with sudden ugly petroleum.

They need only look out at a sheep.

Every sheep within two miles

Is nailing me accurately down

With its hellishly-shaven starved-priest expression.

I emerge. The air, after all, has forgotten everything.

The sugared spindles and wings of grass

Are etched on great goblets. A pigeon falls into space.

The earth is coming quietly and darkly up from a great depth,

Still under the surface. I am unknown,

But nothing is surprised. The tarmac of the road

Is velvet with sleep, the hills are out cold.

A new earth still in its wrappers

Of gauze and cellophane,

The frost from the storage still on its edges,

My privilege to poke and sniff.

The sheep are not much more than the primroses.

And the river there, amazed with itself,

Flexing and trying its lights

And unused fish, that are rising

And sinking for the sheer novelty

As the sun melts the hill’s spine and the spilled light

Flows through their gills …

My mind sinks, rising and sinking.

And the opening arms of the sky forget me

Into the buried tunnel of hazels. There

My boot dangles down, till a thing black and sudden

Savages it, and the river is heaping under,

Alive and malevolent,

A coiling glider of shock, the space-black

Draining off the night-moor, under the hazels …

But I drop and stand square in it, against it,

Then it is river again, washing its soul,

Its stones, its weeds, its fish, its gravels

And the rooty mouths of the hazels clear

Of the discolourings bled in

Off ploughlands and lanes …

At first, I can hardly look at it –

The riding tables, the corrugated

Shanty roofs tightening

To braids, boilings where boulders throw up

Gestures of explosion, black splitting everywhere

To drowning skirts of whiteness, a slither of mirrors

Under the wading hazels. Here it is shallow,

Ropes my knees, lobbing fake boomerangs,

A drowned woman loving each ankle,

But I’m heavier and I wade with them upstream,

Flashing my blue minnow

Up the open throats of water

And across through the side of the rush

Of alligator escaping along there

Under the beards of the hazels, and I slice

The wild nape-hair off the bald bulges,

Till the tightrope of my first footholds

Tangles away downstream

And my bootsoles move as to magnets.

Soon I deepen. And now I meet the piling mob

Of voices and hurriers coming towards me

And tumbling past me. I press through a panic …

This headlong river is a rout

Of tumbrils and gun-carriages, rags and metal,

All the funeral woe-drag of some overnight disaster

Mixed with planets, electrical storms and darkness

On a mapless moorland of granite,

Trailing past me with all its frights, its eyes

With what they have seen and still see,

They drag the flag off my head, a dark insistence

Tearing the spirits from my mind’s edge and from under …

To yank me clear takes the sudden, strong spine

Of one of the river’s real members –

Thoroughly made of dew, lightning and granite

Very slowly over four years. A trout, a foot long,

Lifting its head in a shawl of water,

Fins banked stiff like a trireme

It forces the final curve wide, getting

A long look at me. So much for the horror

It has changed places.

                                   Now I am a man in a painting

(Under the mangy, stuffed head of a fox)

Painted about 1905

Where the river steams and the frost relaxes

On the pear-blossoms. The brassy wood-pigeons

Bubble their colourful voices, and the sun

Rises upon a world well-tried and old.