The poem that follows begins peering into the River Frome, the water that runs through and deepens the valley I live on. It’s called the Golden Valley, named after the fortunes it made for clothiers turned mill owners who harnessed the river and made the famed red broad cloth. This became soldiers’ ‘red coats,’ already dyed the colour of blood stain. Good for butchery.
Dug in next to the river is the old canal, the Stroudwater Navigation, that drew coal barges from across the River Severn, firing the engines of the valley’s industrialisation and yielded narrow boats, laden with cloth, to the Thames. On to the Thames Estuary then and out to the theft and slaughter, to the very edges of the colonies beyond.
The river I peered into that morning though, now runs quietly through town, past the last mill buildings and estates of light industrial sheds. The quiet water became a lens through which I could see the story it passed over, in the same way you see a materiality holding form within its surrounding element; a tree, animated and dancing in the wind, an effigy in flame and earth? Earth holding it all together, holding the scrapes and scars and churnings of the story we’ve been making here.
I realised there, as I looked, I was also dreaming from somewhere within, an expectation of what I should be seeing. I was seeking out, yearning for, a congruence of sorts, the feeling of coming across a river or a stream and wondering at the intrinsic layers dancing together. I wanted the light at play over the water’s skin, held together in banks of plant life, in stone life, to the bed stones and the subtle movements of flow across them. I wanted the shingle beds, their gravels stirring in themselves with a current and releasing minute plumes of silt maybe. I longed for this micro erosion, where everything is immediately different, the consistent dynamics of constant change, in river time. And I desired so many fish, flow embodied as their presence, breathing with us. Kin.
But where this poem starts was in sharp contrast to this expectation of normalcy, of a congruence, a somatic sense of fulfilment that all is well. Here was the water, travelling as itself, over our leftovers, across our debris. Again, I was confronted with ‘the empty’, the green desert of our post-industrial British landscape; the islands’ broadleaf climax long lost and forgotten, denuded of tree and topsoil, enclosed for the profit of a few. And in this glimpse of river, I can’t help but remember those of us who are now poisoning the water for their own enrichment.
The empty holds an air of the silenced, like the stillness that follows an explosion. Our silent witness, the silent spring, continues its lament, its missing song. As I looked ever more deeply into this layer, listening for a string melody in the resonant chord I saw the tiniest of streams, of something leaving an old can that was breaking down into the riverbed. An internal structure in the metal had finally given up and was bleeding out in a chemical trail. Most likely oil based, it slicked a rainbow hue before dispersal on the surface. It left like a thread of smoke in air, I saw it for only a moment, this oily thread, leaving like a spirit of our industry, a ghost of the past, a dose of our poison being swallowed by the river and then, it was gone.
It’s here I feel the sorrowing, which is not the whole weight of the grief, but a yarn within its weave where we’re all, it seems, entangled; consciously or otherwise, we hold the weight of our doing and what has been. Is it numb that I want to be, for a little something to help me through? Maybe, or maybe not, with or without, I’m still the addict son who burnt the plants he needed to salve the ache within.
But I am pulled back in by the oil thread in the Frome, to remembrance, of microplastics, in memory of cellulose, coursing in my bloodstream. The leftovers, string fibres of the ancient sun tree that we’ve pulled and sucked out for our speed. Oh, addict son! Our continual need and inevitably ended growing, growing, growing then, choking out. The oil-fired cancer we’ve become and the half-truths we tell ourselves, just to get by, which wane now with prayers of not too late, not too late.
So, in this dying, I reach back to moments of joy, maybe ones that happened only once, in a last long, hot summer before my own troubles really began. They were still to come and, feeling back to then, there reside moments that made me, that shaped some of my defining fibre.
Like crawling in sunlit bracken, through its fresh green light, my body filled with the air of moss and mulching fronds, feeling as fox for the first time. Or climbing alone a thousand feet, to the peak of Braich Garw and running down as fast as I possibly could; sprinting across rock sides and boulders, foot wide sheep trails, going so fast that my feet barely touched the surface, in perfect flow, never missing a step, until I was sure I could fly. That was the first time I felt the mountain goat of me and nearly eagle.
But there is no way back, to a time before the troubles, either my own or the ones we share now. My troubles, thirty odd years later, eventually led to collapse, to breakdown of myself and my young family. For the sake of raising my children, not checking out, the path led to a renewal, a remaking of me into a relatively more viable human being. Survival, in part, was held in my defining fibre, from the times before, the moments of joy, my love of here, of her, beyond the sorrowing time. This is what I remember when I wonder what I will carry with me into our emergence.
So, to a reckoning, of living with both simultaneously, the joy of a time after us and the grief of our knowing, sewn to each other in threads of sorrow; how we all live with this, over and over, in each moment of the times’ revelation. But are we beginning to remember in another direction, to anchor into a still water of unknowing, undoing, remaking? Somewhere, it is not this. Somewhere, there is an innocent back, turned to a perfect sun, taking care. Somewhere in us now, is not memory at all but the felt quality of those who are left to recall us and how we lived toward them, how we loved and stood for them. In that here, in the empty, we began the planting, repairing, with the joy of unknowing and somewhere, along the way, we found those who’d deserted us, who we’d dishonoured and forgotten. In their forgiveness, we had become. Elders, ancestors or, at least, fools who died trying.
Trout Clans
Stand here now, early Sunday, before the rush, before plans
and machinery make deaf sense of this red brick road bridge
strapped between trailer park and brewery, over the Frome,
as it silk rolls over dumped conc-blocks and cans,
silt-weeds and breaks them to gravel again trying
to make home for a trout clan to sight it. As though
they could ever make it through this town alive.
I am remembering into the emptied water a parching
wooden footbridge over the Ceulan, the hazel-green spine
bristling behind Talybont and rivered into long summer, ’76.
Leant on the rail, I made conversation with a trout clan at hover
in slipstreams at the bridge’s feet, their heads just out of the sun,
nipple-feeding the light’s edge, leaking space dust into their skin,
leaving a hundred solar eclipses, the bursting pressure
of the star for each one to hide behind.
Falling for each moment, burnt out to seed heads,
scattered into water where we wait like this,
sustained and fading through the ropes
of light remembered into ourselves.
They were the eyes of water watching time as it fell
to meet the Leri, their merge turning the tweed mill wheel,
after the drop pool, where another clan waited. They saw
us dive toward them from high flat branches, they caught
the feel of us feeling, their mass slapped onto our skins
as we swam for bed stones who’d push us up for air.
I strip now, in this eldering skin and swim this
near-blind river, under the red bricks. Remember with me,
into the emptied water, the trout clans’ returns, buried
in a swimming mind, in the shoal water,
known ghosts in the flood.
Until next time. Go well. With love from here.
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