Poetry

Night walk by the River Don

Saturday. The city's out there dancing
and I'm suffused in alcoholic fug
sleeping in my clothes and dreaming some
night walk by the River Don where
Neepsend Lane plays tributary to
Penistone Road, where hostelry ghosts
of the Farfield Inn drink on, nine years
since the Don called an imperious last
orders, its waters rising as high as the bar
and here my feet make off northwest:
a lane flanked dense with thickets,
the freakish Don below, a carriageway
of bustling currents. I commute upriver,
the work of the dream awaiting and white
points of light, white lines of engine noise
reaching from the road beyond. A moment
comes when rumination's apt, when to
offer down my soles to stroke the surface
seems the fittest course. I mull, send texts
(the Don could take me if it wanted to),
and I can't vouch for unseen trees
falling in the forest, but my dreamstate
absence here attests the Don still flows
when nobody is there. Its spate persists,
relentless, unabashed. Taking a cue, I
rise again and shun the lane to hold
fast to the bank, backtracking, softstepping,
taking two small falls to founder
in soft ground, still clambering implausible
ledges that narrow near to nought,
aware that if this mud dispels all friction,
balance elude us and my footing fail, I'll
dream a fatal dash against a concrete edge,
wake bewildered, wondering and unscathed.
Further up our way broadens and emerges
onto some industrial estate: undisturbed,
I dodge a barrier watched by rows of
empty windows, which disclose only
blankness, and an assumed panopticon of
CCTV lenses up in the gods. A shopfitter,
a tool parts supplier. I can't tell whether
they're going concerns or gone; we take
dereliction as read, scoping the city
that never wakes up. In the end I'm
circling one small section of some dirt track
shot with potholes, Hillsborough's lights
glaring over from across the way, playing
on the tarry, sluggish surface of the Don
to set a monochrome mosaic. The city
too, it seems, continues to exist alone
when I dream I'm somewhere else.
The only thing to do's retrace my steps.
Somewhere a security guard chuckles
as I cross his screen again. Back at the start,
just before the dream fades, there I am
baffled by a dumped bathtub I'd not
registered before, matteroffact
as elephants in rooms. I wake to find
my coat and boots bedaubed in river mud;
on my phone, each step recorded by
an app that tracks your way by GPS, and the
bathtub photographed, stark as a full stop.

Pete Green