Sweet Diction, South and South

Late in 2011, in the embers of the year, I spent three days on the Boyne in the company of Tony Holten, the author of On Ancient Roads: Recollections, History and Folklore of County Meath and Oliver Delaney, owner of Bective Mill, also a historian, and with the good volunteers of the Meath River Rescue. Like Tony and Oliver, I am also a "book man," a librarian by profession and a writer with a weakness for the marked page.

The days yielded many things: views from underneath the joins in ancient bridges where they were widened to accommodate modern traffic; the knowledge that even when you know you are sinking it is better to steer clear of saying, "We're sinking" (saying "We're taking water" is acceptable and communicates the message admirably); that the Meath River Rescue does not place humans above sheep, swans, and dogs, but will respond to all calls; that spiritualists are as useful to a river search as GPS; that the thirst that strikes on the river is a powerful one; and that the word "rescue" is the one that is used but what is generally meant and understood is "recovery."

The men who do this work love the river and the necessary work they do. They almost never speak of the things they have seen, apart from the rare mention of a pair of new shoes placed side-by-side at a bridge parapet (which you never forget because the shoes were new or because of how they were placed, as though in a wardrobe, under the suit they were bought to be worn with). They will tell you what they heard about the Boyne having frozen in the winter of 1940 when it was used as a road by the hay carters heading south to the cattle market in Dublin; the nail heads were raised in the shoes of the draft horses to give them purchase on the ice. The rescue men remember spiriting forks from cutlery drawers to spear eels and bring them home to be fried in butter on the range in the pan. They remember using orange onion bags slit fully down the front and slightly less at the back to net the rainbow trout tucked in under the bank. And being sickened from eating too much salmon in the days when the big fish ran these stretches.

Another thing that came from that trip was a couplet that got its start from the first day, downstream from the bridge built to accommodate Mel Gibson's roughshod ride over Scottish history in Braveheart, which presented the medieval Meath town of Trim as the fortified English town of York. Somewhere between Scurlogstown and Bective, as the spotters at the prow kept eyes peeled for fallen trees and discarded shopping trollies, and called to the cox to lift the engine to save the caged propeller from rocks, an otter paused in the middle of its busy life, stood up out of the water on what was left of a medieval weir or an eel trap and looked me in the face. And I, pausing from my enquiring and recording and incessant photographing, looked back likewise into its wide, watery eyes filled with curiosity.

Everything around that fixed instant flowed, as in that moment when strangers on the same path encounter each other and take the first tentative steps at sounding each other out or at getting past each other without incident. The otter looked sleek and fit, slimmer than in summer, turning in the air as it would in water, the spine curving with great ease, the back feet sure of their wet ground, the tail strong like an extra limb. The cox killed our outboard engine. Manmade noise fell away, and silence and the sounds of running water grew. Then that instant, too, flowed—for in truth, neither the otter nor I had ever truly stopped.

The following spring, a couplet that I titled "The Middle Reaches," presented itself. Staying out of the way of the poem that's trying to get written has often appeared to be the main part...