Nick Pemberton
Drunk in the Country
Wandering through bracken and boulders in search
of a river whose track he lost long ago,
drunk as a skunk in summer’s fecund fields,
he thought: to be born and feel the sky,
bright & silver, pierce your eye is enough
but among thistle, sandstone and sudden moss,
his feet failed him and he foundered. Gravity tugged
glass from his hand. Land leaped up and smashed it.
What is changeless in the world,
said a voice inside him - like water on rock
scoured and pitted by the clear stream -
gives rise to dreams and shapes of dreams
towards which our blind lives reach and stumble.
‘Wrong,’ buzzed a wasp, a fine-waisted dandy
stepping in striped jacket through the sweet
lost treasure that scented the broken shards
scattered before his face as he lay there,
‘a world such as you have imagined,
a chaotic geometry of elided signs,
immutable laughter and echoed cries
you would find unbearable.’
His lids grew heavy.
His eyes closed against the sky’s aching light.
The silent, remembered river flowed on, unseen.
Nick Pemberton lives in Cumbria and lectures in Media, Literature, Performing Arts, Multi Media and so forth at Cumbria College of Art & Design. At present he is working on the script to a drama documentary about the U boat menace during World War One and how the talents of a music hall and vaudeville performer - Captain Joseph Woodward and his troupe of performing California sealions - were briefly employed to combat the menace.
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