Since the medieval period, rivers in counties Dublin and Wicklow have been diverted to feed the city’s ever-growing needs. Between 1937 and 1947, the Poulaphouca reservoir was created by damming the River Liffey and flooding the valley of the King’s River, its small, acid-water tributary. Farms, woods and Ballinahown village were all submerged. Freed from the confines of the riverbed to range over fields and woods, small trout gorged themselves till they grew bloated and diseased. In 1978, when the water levels dropped to an all-time low, submerged rooftops appeared above the surface of the lake.

oooooooooooooogreylag geese graze
ooooooooooooooas the bog road reappears –
oooooooooooooofloating thatch reeds

SEAWARDS

My neighbourhood is suspended like a hammock over the River Swan, all seventeen kilometers of whose convoluted course have been culverted and converted into storm drains and sewers. Walking past the Swan Centre, Swan Leisure, Swan Cinema, Swanville Place, it is possible to remain completely unaware of the river network weaving its way mere feet beneath us. But sometimes the river will reveal itself, by sudden subsidence, or geysers of drain water erupting up through shores.

oooooooooooooohome from work –
oooooooooooooowelcoming committee
ooooooooooooooof floating chairs

The main branch of the Swan rises near Kimmage Manor, and flows past Hazelbrook Farm, site of the original HB Ice-cream, and the former home of Miss North, the well-known water-diviner.

ooooooooooooootwitching branches  –
oooooooooooooothe weight of catkins
ooooooooooooooin the breeze

As it makes its way towards the sea the Swan is joined by four contributing branches whose names are redolent of local history: the Roundtown Stream, the Blackberry Brook, Bloody Fields Water, and Baggotrath Brook. All five branches discharge into the Dodder Estuary near Ringsend. It may be that the river was named for swans nesting along the sloblands here before the land was reclaimed from the sea.

ooooooooooooootidal water
oooooooooooooofeathered with grey light –
oooooooooooooocygnets hatching

FLOTSAM

The Poddle is the best-known of Dublin’s hidden rivers. It flows beneath Tallaght, Kimmage, Harold’s Cross and Blackpitts before entering the River Liffey close to Dublin City Centre. On its way, the river emerges from culverts to flow overground at Mount Argus, where the waters are split by a piece of masonry known as the Stone Boat or Tongue, built in the 13^th century to divert a water supply for the Mayor’s citizens.

oooooooooooooothis stone tongue
oooooooooooooosplicing the water course –
ooooooooooooooriver maw

The park at Mount Argus includes a flood storage pond to help reduce the risk of downstream flooding when the river has resumed its underground route. The grounds have an air of neglect; the water is littered and noisome in warm weather. The drive up to the church is lined by copper beeches, which cast deep shadows; and overlooked by the imposing Lourdes Grotto. The presiding spirit is that of St Charles, who joined the Passionist monastery there in 1847. He is remembered for his gift of healing the sick.

Last year a homeless man was found dead in the undergrowth. Rumour had it that the deceased was a character well-known locally for his foul-mouthed verbal assaults and early morning arson attacks. Reaction to his death was muted. When the arson resumed, it was assumed to be a case of mistaken identity.

oooooooooooooowakened
ooooooooooooooby crackling skip-fires –
oooooooooooooohydrants gush

From late medieval times, the Patrick Street area was regularly flooded by disease-carrying water from the Poddle, damaging the vaults of St Patrick’s Cathedral and prompting Dean Jonathan Swift to take remedial action. In 1835, during the course of further flood repairs to the vaults, the Dean’s coffin was opened. His skull was removed for examination by the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Details of the examination were recorded by Sir William Wilde, in an effort to determine the cause of the deafness and vertigo suffered by the Dean throughout his life.

oooooooooooooowater courses
ooooooooooooooroaring underground –
oooooooooooooobelow hearing

The periodic flooding of the Poddle continued throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In late October 2011, the equivalent of one month’s rain fell in twenty-four hours. A malfunction at the tidal floodgates meant that the floodwater could not escape out to sea, and erupted upwards through drains. The Poddle burst its banks and cascaded downhill from Harold’s Cross onto Parnell Road, while the canal in front spilled over its containing wall. Hospice nurse Cecilia de Jesus, unable to force open the door of her apartment against the rising water, was drowned.

ooooooooooooooswelling brown water
ooooooooooooooinundates basements –
oooooooooooooorags snag on branches

Amanda Bell is a freelance editor and award-winning poet. Publications include Maurice Craig: Photographs (Lilliput, 2011) and The Lion Tamer Dreams of Office Work: An Anthology of Poetry by the Hibernian Writers (Alba Publishing, 2015). In 2016 she was selected for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series, and the Munster Literature Centre’s Prebooked Readings for Emerging Writers. Undercurrents is her first solo collection. ‘This stone tongue’ was previously published in Presence 52.

Yesterday, months into a rather poor fishing season, my nephew caught a trout, dapping hoppers at Cornacille on Lough Conn. His keen just-turned-nine-year-old eyes caught the fish’s mouth as it sucked the tangled insect-bundle down. A pause of three long-counted seconds, and he lifted the pole sharply to strike, driving the barb clean through the trout’s jaw. The brittle-limbed insect impaled on the lure shattered with the force of the strike. Forgotten motes drifted down through green water to rest eventually on the bottom, where once snail-shells and, increasingly, zebra mussels build up in shaley banks. Meanwhile, in the boat, coshed on the poll, the trout, dulling beneath its mucal coat, is dead. It is a present for me.

Once, it would have been brought ashore and gutted in the shallows, a knife point used to grate off its scales like shards of mica, each one reflecting the scudding sky over Nephin as it drifted on the water lapping around the boat.  A fire of dried gorse and driftwood would have been lit, a black kettle filled with lake water for tea, a blacker, battered frying pan produced, and the trout sizzled in butter, its flesh transforming into rose-pink flakes, its glinting skin into a crisp, brown wrapper. Portioned out on the flat of knives, its twisted skeleton would have been thrown back into the water, its fins picked over by gulls.

But not this trout. Today, they are fewer, and the moment of triumph must be prolonged. Weighed, measured, gutted, the little headless vessel is wrapped in damp newspaper and rushed home to the freezer. Once he is in there, safe, definitely not going anywhere, his fate can be deliberated. He can be defrosted and smoked, or lined with lemon-slices and baked, served cold, his striations the ribs of a discarded feather on the plate. He can be gifted, he is an offering, a totem, a sign that all is well, that fish are caught, that people eat, that we can provide.

For most of the twentieth-century, the sister lakes of Conn and Cullin were internationally renowned trout fisheries. Up to my childhood in the 1970s, a large salmon was a trophy to be shown off in the local hotel, a specimen pike might be stuffed and mounted, but trout made a good lunch, perch a good breakfast.

Today, due to a sharp decline in fish stocks, local tourism initiatives promote golf, cycling and walking holidays rather than angling, there are fewer professional ghillies, demand for boat hire has plummeted, and of the two local fishing hotels, one is closed due to fire, the other in receivership. All evidence connects the decline in fishing stocks to human intervention: rising phosphate levels due to unregulated agricultural run-off, eutrophication caused by overloading of local sewage plants and unregulated septic tanks, and the introduction of the invasive zebra mussel in the early 1990s, a development which has fundamentally affected the ecology of the lake, and changed fish feeding patterns from taking flies on the water-surface to increased bottom feeding. As fish-takes have now been reduced to less than a third of mid-twentieth-century levels, the question arises as to whether the trout are feeding on the bottom or whether they are actually there at all.

So a Lough Conn trout is not such a common thing. In the age of the supermarket and convenience store, domestic food preservation has ceased to be a necessity, and become a symptom of a need to possess, a fear of the ephemeral. Every trout might just be the last one, and freezing in some way prolongs the appreciation of the catch, becoming another link in the chain of human intervention which simultaneously disrupts the balance of nature and tries vainly to arrest the course of change. In much the same way as I am trying to preserve something of the trout myself in writing. If you can see, or smell, or taste my trout, then these words are my salt, my ice, and the trout is swimming in a virtual lake now, a watery repository from which it can be lured over and over again.

Amanda Bell works as a freelance editor and writer, and is a doctoral candidate in UCD. Her poetry has been published in print and online journals, and in 2014 was shortlisted for the Cúirt New Writing Prize and the Strokestown International Poetry Competition.

BURREN VULTURE

Captive at the raptor centre,

far from the dakhma,

you hop among spectators –

plucked neck undulating towards

your prehistoric head.

The crowd gasps at your wingspan,

as you wheel among their infants –

heedless of their softness,

their downy fontanelles.

Far from the dakhma,

do the stacked bones of Poulnabrone

stir ancestral echoes

of sun-scorched carrion,

clean-picked skulls?

Captive at the raptor centre,

your bone-splintering bill

is a thrill for the punters;

back home the skies are empty,

and wild dogs are on the rise.

TROGLODYTES

On visiting Lascaux cave for the 70th anniversary of its discovery

Inland, the road torcs into forest.

Among walnut trees, the house vibrates

with life: bees, hummingbird moths,

an infestation of squat black crickets.

They love the shade of cool clay tiles,

watch as we sleep, eat, bathe, make love.

We sweep them out at night; they won’t jump –

just scuttle, and keep returning.

Deep in the lamplit chamber, shadows

in the knotted scaffolding, they watched

hands palpate the limestone for flanks, spines,

manes – and draw them into life.

And when the lamps guttered, they scurried

over aurochs, bison, the inverted horse,

till a dog arrived, with boys and lights,

and they were brushed aside:

not far, but out of sight,

waiting for night to fall.

Amanda Bell works as a freelance editor and writer, and is a doctoral candidate in UCD. Her poetry has been published in print and online journals, and in 2014 was shortlisted for the Cúirt New Writing Prize and the Strokestown International Poetry Competition.