Telepath

i

What would you choose if a look could kill,

turn the tide or save the day.

Reverse fortunes on the head of a sixpence.

Turn your only godchild to stone

(that she might have a change of heart) 

or do you stare helplessly

into the abyss – immobilized by your sense

of historical inevitability.

ii

Frau Demuth already sees what will become

of Marx’s first biographer

on the day she announces her engagement

to Doctor Aveling (since loneliness

can’t be cured by a kiss)

but for all her knowing looks, she can only study

the waltz of shades unraveling

during Sunday dinner at Regent’s Park.

Second sight – powerless to stop time,

despite the ‘sure thing’

of a spectre haunting Europe

or the shabby ghost of a third Jewish messiah

whose ideas would one day divide the world.

iii

Any wonder why Eleanor Marx fell

through the looking glass. Crashing from nervosa

to love. Love to nervosa. And nervosa

back to love again.

Impossible, in all the after dinner conversation,

to tell which from which.

Only that the phrase: ‘this looks familiar,’

goes unheard by those whom we would save

from themselves,

if only they would hear us.

Cosmic Cradle

i

What shall we do with our nameless child – 

so much a part of us? So much more, than loss of hope

for Karl and Jenny, or the burial record

of an invisible girl? She who holds both dissonance

and harmony (rose and wreath

in her tiny hands) as we lay her to rest

under indifferent skies, but no one knows why  

a dying girl’s face tilts

towards the moon.

ii

Last night, the girl we already grieve

as a lost galaxy – crawled from her crib to sing

as a star – spreading her wings

in exquisite poverty. Here at the world’s edge,

her breath leaves semitones of light

on the latticed glass.

Here, nothing is more important

than music and moonlight.

Shining Light

We have learned your name by heart,

Helene Lenchen Demuth.

And we can tell you that Demuth,

from the Middle High German, ‘diemuot,’

or ‘demuot,’ is a nickname

given for a humble or modest person.

How do we know, only because

there’s no equivalence for ‘Lenchen’

in the Indo-European vernacular,

but ‘L’ is always for love,

which you give to all you encounter.

‘E’ is for equal footing, because you meet

us all on a level playing field.

‘N’ is for necessity, because the realm

of needs, can never be breached

by the leap to freedom alone.

‘C’ is for change, because you adapt

to both ebb and flow. ‘H’ is for heart,

because you always make a home  

out of hope. ‘E’ is for endure,

because we can never forget you.

‘N’ is for nodal point, because going on

is the only option to not going back.

Prelude in E Minor Op. 28 No. 4

for Nora

What is this sadness that invites us

to withdraw into the magic

of minor keys. Are we the astronomers

of descending melodies, discovering

the faintest of stars. Is this what loneliness

sounds like. Chord chains torn

from another dimension. As if the heart,

(cleaved from the body) still grieves alone

in a Warsaw crypt. Tomorrow we smile

again, for tonight we live

our saddest dreams.

Diamonds and Water.

The book of your life is hardly written

yet you look at the world

with all the curiosity life affords.

And though you sit and watch in silence,

you reject the impasse

of a world that defies kindness.

Understanding the secret

ballot that ties the big stick to diplomacy,

or as democracy’s diary

would have it: ‘All for ourselves

and nothing for other people.’ A maxim

so deeply rooted, so definite  

in the division of worlds, it chaperones,

protects and champions

portfolio investment in art, repo-markets

and perfect competition in a face off

with the tasteless tyranny

of the ‘herd.’

You know it’s not your job to think,

only to follow orders,.

yet you have devoted your heart

to the struggle to shape your own ideas,

in your transformation

from wide-eyed peasant girl 

to radical, confidante, and public enemy 

with Soho’s most dangerous

philosopher. A dissident Jewish doctor,

forced to pawn

his only suit of clothes

to buy a coffin for his unnamed daughter – 

unwrapping the ultimate paradox

of value.

Thistle in Humble Soil

Perhaps your closed crown defies the wind

in a field where shadows bully

the faithless, but we live

here where faith is currency

to silence the Aspen’s wild pulse.

Where is the ‘doing’ word that gives us

the upper hand? We speak

while we still have use of our tongues.

In less than a heartbeat

your spiny leaves will yield

their armor under the heavy boots

of Caledonian foresters,

but your magenta crowned florets will prevail

in the field’s heart as if poised to mend

the world. You who thrive

in the barest of ground, rise up again

in winter’s drifts. Testament how we live

to fight another day.

Helene Demuth Notes A Change of Heart

Q. How do you turn down a dialectical thinker

with a hard on for a new idea?

A. Tell him the dialectics of hope turn out to be

nothing more than the interpenetration

of id and ego. You can’t always hold back

the tide, but you can always muddy the waters

by taking refuge in the greatest good

for the greatest number. One death is heroic.

Two deaths, a tragedy. Better to be dissatisfied

as Socrates, than satisfied as a pig.

A qualitative leap between, ‘I have begun

to long for you.’

And, ‘I who have no need.’

Venturing Beyond

You are not a peasant girl from Sankt Wendel,

Housekeeper or fellow traveller.

You are not your age, or even ageless.

You are all the people you touch

when other people find them untouchable.

All the smiles you bring to others

when smiling is felt subordinate to living.

You are the promises on both sides

of assonance and dissonance.

You are the discontent which belongs to hope.

You are the tears of Niobe when pride takes a fall.

You are the verity of pride

when pride surrenders to pity.

You are all children that are never lost

because you are reborn in the image of children

(the Not-Yet-Conscious and Not-Yet-Become)

on the horizon of all being.

You are the one who changes

into what they really are, what they can really be.

The forward dreamer, who is yet to break

through into words.

Van Gogh’s Irises

Even in La Villle d’Amour, the state of emergency

is not the exception but the rule.

Think of the continuous flow of empty time

and the tiger’s leap into the thickets of long ago.

Think of two hundred canon on the brow

of Montmartre. Of the sixty-four days redeeming

the past in service of the present.

Think of blue irises at the Wall of Love

and the words ‘I love you,’ on three hundred tongues.

Think of purple irises uniting springtime love

with the Communard’s Wall.

Think of the history of civilisation

written in blood. Then think of the future as a flower

turning towards the sun – rising in the sky

of a history – yet to be written.

Angelus Novus

Art does not reproduce what we see, rather, it makes us see.

Paul Klee

All art is metaphor. Even when it evokes the union

between progress and catastrophe

Time in need of salvation, an ancestor

in need of awakening, or an angel thwarted

by war and civil war. A storm cloud 

blown in from paradise –

trapped between future past and future present.

Suspended in the struggle of empty-time.

Staring towards the horizon, saying something

profound. Awaiting an answer, beyond

the artifice of perception, as she turns her thoughts

away from internal flight.

The West is the best. The West is the best.

Here! Here! Let’s hear the rest! Light at the end

of the tunnel – the only extraction now

from time in a cage.

What is the Name of this Poem?

i

Your social aims may be fashionable

and indeed, admirable, but no amount of political cheer leading

can prepare you for the darkness

of the lived moment. If semiology is a negation –  

no amount of words can expurgate, refine

or reform the shit shovel. What is

‘ghost forest’ for you is only a private metaphor

for desertification.

An exile from the ancient city of Aleppo,

might well be ‘displaced,’ but any politically correct verbiage

belies the human dimension of losing one’s home,

one’s family and being compelled

to live in a skip or public toilet like an alley cat.

A rebel from Mount Simeon, might well be a ‘job seeker’

to you, but any attempt to dress ‘stateless nationals’

as anything other than ‘stake holders’

will be met with derision from the floor. Since a reserve army

of unemployed is always good for business.

ii

If thought itself can be called a negation:

what of unsustainability and over-production?

Since no concept can articulate the whole relationship

vis-a-vis man and Nature – the semiotics

of exhuming the dead or saving the planet to secure a home – 

will be met by an irresistible canon ball

fired at an immovable post. Positing truth itself

is negative – insofar as it presupposes

something else is not true.

Shamanic Dance Sublation

for Douglas Colston & Dylan Murphy

i

O’ pliable experts in humanity. You who proclaim

the end of history. You who mop the brow

of Nero (bless the mob as you talk our dreams to sleep)

hold a noose over the past, as if to cut a deal

with the future. You who watch Rome burning 

while the tyrant fiddles, if only to observe

the facts. You who say nothing of master and slave,

lost peoples, stolen lands.  Mouthing

those heroic last words: ‘What an artist dies in me,’

as if to turn language and art into consumables – buy up

the last innocence of thought. You who procure

freedom like a bestiarii in that chamber of horrors

we call the Circus – for the age-old celebration

of ‘business as usual.’  In the prison of apprehension

we can hardly move, let alone breathe freely,

but history doesn’t end in triumphalism for one class

or nation over its rivals. It is open to the future 

precisely because we’re surrounded by possibility.

Because agency suggests the content

of the future – because the ‘mystical fire’ of the soul 

lives forever in the recall of night eyes. 

In the constellations of Orion and Cassiopeia.

Where we dream and we remember: 

Nature and human nature are opposite sides 

of the same nature because we still live in a prehistory 

that only stands because we are yet to grasp

who we are. What we might be without constructs

and aggregates – the esoteric architecture

of studio, stadia, steeple, church. The appropriation 

of man by man. Division and progress. Progress

and division.

ii

To know a thing is to know its end but the quest

for knowledge is not conquest of the unknown 

but a journey through the unknowable.

Being moves through time  – from the Servile Wars

of Spartacus to the Peasant Revolt,

from the beheading of a Cavalier King to the shootings

of the Tsar and Tsarina .But time only remains

as a function of being. The real antagonism for the cat

in the box is living. In the boardrooms of Titanic,

progress implicates itself as problem

and solution, but the solution remains the problem.

If we are to translate the world as we change it,

we must learn how observation weasels out

of objectivity. In the bordellos of objectivism,

we must renegotiate the objections to knowledge

over function. Where science serves myth

and myth maker, (which only paves the way

for more whoring) the self-encounter is not quantitive 

or absolute, but rebellious because it puts no price

on sovereignty. S is not yet P,

but when we change subject and predicate,

we change how we see the world. Age and death

can do no more to define us because the ‘Now’ 

is our time.  The locus of Winstanley’s diggers 

(which is Not Yet articulated)

is beginning to carve the skyline of the future

from the vanishing point of the past into the horizon

of the present. The sky in Heraclitus reminds us

how flow and flaw reveal the path ahead.

We find ourselves in the places where we were most lost.

iii

We find ourselves in the Shamanic dance

of ancestors, in the Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee – 

in moments torn from time, because being

and time are tied to a tug of war in the infinite

possibilities of the finite. True genesis (the creation

of man by man) does not call for gods.

It is not at the starting gate but the finish line 

because freedom is not the fabled flower of immortality

but the action of picking the wild flower

from the chain – the present moment fulfilled 

in the rupturing of empty time.

In the leap between the rebel dead and the Novum. 

Fearing the past only petrifies the past

until slave and rebellion are redeemed in the present,

because the past is only a rebellion 

for memory until it is re-enacted in the world.

Rebellion not only pervades the past – it proposes

the future. Reminds us of the light

at the mouth of the cave, because the sun

(which is yesterday’s memory) ascends in the daydream

of childhood. In the homeland of all living beings

where man is yet to belong. As the slave army turns

to the sun, so the past turns to us 

before it threatens to disappear – because healing begins

in the rebellion  of the fragmented mind 

and we are the creators

of miracles. 

BETWEEN ONE AND ZERO

(Setting: An interview. Anywhere.)

Interviewer: Hello, Mrs. Reynolds.

Melba: Hazelton. I kept my name.

Interview: For the sake of this interview I’m going to refer to you as Mrs. Reynolds.

Melba: Oh, fine. Whatever.

Interview: You’ll settle for that?

Melba: Get on with it. Please.

Interview: Tell me about what happened yesterday.

Melba: That’s it? Are you serious?

Interview: Everything you can remember.

Melba: It was a beautiful day, I guess.

Interviewer: The weather?

Melba: You know I hate this season.

Interviewer: You hate all the seasons, these days. You only notice in the summer.

Melba: Still, the content was beautiful. I woke up at—

Interviewer: I’m more interested in how it ended.

Melba: In sleep, naturally.

Interviewer: And before that?

Melba: Michael barbequed. The meat came out perfectly, not too well-done. There were some fireflies in the garden.

Interviewer: I don’t care about the animals eaten or alive. Those are trivial, incidental. The details distract from the underlying truth.

Melba: I thought you wanted to know everything. Can’t you filter what you decide is important?

Interviewer: Try to focus on the subtleties. What no one but you had empirical access to.

Melba: Such as?

Interviewer: I think you know what you’re not mentioning.

Melba: I woke up. I went to work—

Interviewer: Tried to ignore it. Won’t work, won’t work.

Melba: What?

Interviewer: Boredom boredom crushing boredom. You notice your heart pumping. You’re aware when your lungs release. These things are supposed to be autonomic, but your brain sends the wrong signal. Boredom. Pump. Boredom. Breathe.

Melba: No, I like my job. It took me years to get here.

Interviewer: Not there. Not any one place. In the lining between. Underneath the perfect meat, boredom is a seasoning.

Melba: I love my children. So I love my life. I can’t be bored when I’m filled with love, I can’t. I love my children.

Interviewer: As you love your husband, Michael Reynolds?

Melba: Yes.

Interviewer: He’s someone you protect and fight for. You feel no vaginal passion and fill this gaping hole with any object you can touch. You look at fireflies and try to make them exciting. You watch your children chase them, and you watch yourself watching them. How idyllic, how artful, you force yourself to think. How lucky I must therefore be, as if life were math and you had the winning numbers.

Melba: Happiness isn’t simple, of course. But neither is its absence. There’s no vacuum.

Interviewer: I’m not suggesting you’re completely unhappy, Mrs. Reynolds.

Melba: Melba.

Interviewer: Merely less so than perhaps you should be.

Melba: What, then, should I be? Who should I be?

Interviewer: Someone who remembers when her last orgasm was. (Pause) My god, you do remember, don’t you? And you count the expanding days.

Melba: There’s always a blank spot.

Interview: Yours will grow until it consumes you, for you know you’re aging and pretend that all progress is good. You’re not quite jealous of yourself at 18, not yet. You remember her pain too clearly.

Melba: I always ache after the orgasm. All consensual sex leaves me sore, broken. My constitution wasn’t built to sustain the rush. The subsequent crash is too frequent, too immediate, to justify the high. And it always comes in that order: First good, then bad, with the latter more intense. It never goes in the other order, things never get better. The initial pleasure is invalidated by the overwhelming sharpness. And then: Despair sets in.

Interviewer: That sounds very clinical. Good for you that you’ve articulated your emptiness in a way that makes sense to you. How cleverly you’ve talked yourself out of what you choose to miss. You still miss it, though. You’re not a robot.

Melba: No. I’m definitely not a robot.

Interviewer: Still, you abstain from both peak and valley, turn your life into a flatline. Who gave you the authority to take that away from yourself? To will yourself, if not happy, then old?

Melba: Dread.

Interviewer: Dread is not an authority. It is a liar, even when proves itself right. How is that working out for you, by the way? Are you living without dread, now that you’ve essentially defined yourself by it? (pause)When was the last time you had enjoyable sex?

Melba: I took my children to the park. That is what sex is for.

Interviewer: Not for you? Is pleasure so shallow just because it touches skin?

Melba: For the children, I submitted. As often as it took.

Interview: And every day since is a “lovely” ordeal.

Melba: You should see them, illuminated by the setting sun, following fireflies off of my porch.

Interview: Well, sure. You have to notice the little buzzing things, enjoy each slowly dying second. This is what unhappy optimists do. They pretend the sacrifice is worth it.

Melba: What—what is the point of this interview?

Interviewer: I am conducting research and contrasting you to your alternate.

Melba: Who never married Michael Reynolds?

Interviewer: Correct.

Melba: Which one? There must be an infinite number of scenarios, literally infinite, where I don’t marry Michael. Am I to compete with all of them?

Interviewer: No, although you’re right that forks beget forks, I’m only observing two possibilities. This man or that man, zero or one. I’m judging you against Mrs. Robert Kane.

Melba: (pause)Bobby.

Interviewer: Do you remember that Christmas party when he came back into your life? Or potentially did?

Melba: Daily. But I’m sure I think of everything daily.

Interviewer: Don’t lie to your sub-consciousness. It never works.

Melba: I had already moved in with Michael when Bobby and I…reconnected. By chance at that party. I never would hurt him by pursuing other men.

Interviewer: Why not? There’s no such thing as being pre-married. In order for marriage to mean anything, you can’t give it away too early. But you thought you were more committed to a very specific universe than was the actual case. You were wrong. Cosmically, fundamentally. Atomically.

Melba: You can’t possibly know that. Not as an absolute.

Interviewer: At the rate you’re going you’ll wind up as lonely and sexually frustrated as you were when you were 18, only this time you’ll have no hope to look to. The thing you’ll most consistently dream of is the sound of your husband’s breathing, never knowing if you’re awake or not. Your good dreams will be the cruelest of false positives. That you’re lying next to another human will do nothing but make your loneliness OBSCENE.

All this because you could never recover from the hurt Bobby accidentally threw at you at 18. You could never give real love a second chance, for fear it would leave again. As if Bobby hadn’t grown up at all. So you settled for the plastic that would never decay. When did beauty become so frightening? Around the same time you confused orgasms with torture? You just want life boring so you’ll be less afraid of death. How morbid. You let death win.

I see Mrs. Kane, the one who chose more wisely. I’m sorry to invalidate everything you’ve worked for, but that’s the point—Her smile is less forced. Thus she’s the one I choose to let life breathe into, to close the gap between potential and forever.

Melba: I love my children. Michael’s children.

Interviewer: Take as long as you need to mourn them. But back they go, no harm done.

Melba: How can you say that? You’re not the one who has to go back to the age of 29, and break up with a man you genuinely love. God, I have to look him in the eye.  I have to watch his face.

Interviewer: No doubt this will hurt. But its prevention isn’t worth a lifetime of mediocre fulfillment, which won’t hurt so much as itch in a place you can’t reach. That would be too high an avoidance cost. Tears, though, tears are cathartic, cleansing. How healthful to the body to relieve its inner conflict. (He hands her a tissue)

Melba: (She accepts it but does not take it to her face)Why would you give me this near-complete contentment only to take it away? Do my modest joys come to nothing, for being modest?

Interviewer: I care too much about you to settle for the beta version. Not when I’ve seen you in more perfect light.

Melba: Oh, Michael. My sweet Michael.

Interview: You will miss him. But you miss Bobby more now, a truth which denying fails to fix. Cognizance is better. Dissonance is a waste of your brain.

Melba: This doesn’t feel like change, it feels like death. This Melba Hazelton, this Mrs. Reynolds, is dying. I’m dying.

Interviewer: Oh, Darling. (pause) You are.

Alaina Hammond is a poet, playwright, fiction writer, and visual artist. Her poems, short stories, paintings, drawings and photographs have been published both online and in print. @alainaheidelberger on Instagram. Playwright’s note: Between One and Zero was originally produced at Manhattan Theatre Source, in June 2009. It starred Eliza Lay as Melba and Seth Lombardi as Interviewer.

From June to May

I have never said I love you

To me you are always new

l feel that l love you the best

Really you are not my guest.

I have never given you a rose

In literature you are the best prose

You are the best rose in my garden

You are the fairy queen in my heaven. 

l have never touched your heart

But look, you are not far apart

You won’t live without me a day

The moon says- from June to May.

I have never sent you costly gift

True love never demands any lift

I love you without the traditional world

Speaking truly, my love isn’t so called.

I have never dreamt a dream

Where is absent your cream

we walk along the path of love 

ln my sky, you are my love dove.

Peer Smits (The Netherlands), writer-prose, poetry-photographer, composer, visual artist. Likes music-punk, reggea- as an inspiration and for fun. Three books-Het hanenei, 2007, Compositions, and We do stencils-2024.Artist since 1982. Poetry published in (inter-)national magazines.

Pillow feather hunts pillow feather

The bed still remembers the shapes of our bodies

Outside the window the air turns into graves for the missing pilots

I dream of fucking you as before as before your funeral

***

I want to be the rain that washes off your skin

I don’t want to be the tear that washes away your joy

The tree controls the leaves and the soil controls the dead

You control my heart and I have nothing left but my heart

My brother Brutus is shaven and white like ivory

I’m coming from to your house to save you from my brother

I’m not going to your house so I’ll save you from myself

I never had a brother in reality and I will never betray myself again

I’m walking down the street in the middle of the day and it’s dark all around

***

ring on my finger

centenary rings belonging to a tree

I freeze unable to say a word

my hope is my leaves

months of my existence pass in anticipation of the birds

but the birds scattered all over the world in search of a new home

only the little boy inside me is still hiding in the basement

of his parents’ house trying to escape from air bombs and missiles

***

birds drink the silence

of a broken sakura

branch like for the first time

***

eyelashes tied in knots

but the eyes still see how the oak says

goodbye to yellowing leaves

Point Of Correction

For the SS2 students of Great Immaculate Secondary School, 2013/2014 Academic Session.

Adaeze took no nonsense from anybody. Anybody at all. She was bold and outspoken. She knew what she wanted at anytime. Fear never occurred to her. She would be the first person ever in our school to challenge Scubo, the Scout man who made sure there was order in our school. He acted like some sort of security man. He organized the exams, made sure nobody cheated, took the exam papers back to the teachers. In addition to these, he instilled fear into the students. It was impossible for one to be normal in the presence of Scubo because his own flogging was more painful than that of everybody else who had the power to flog the students – the seniors, the teachers, the school director. If Scubo had ever flogged you, you had no other choice than to fear him. What I myself felt towards Scubo was just fear. I did not see Scubo as a normal human being. When I saw Scubo the only thing I saw was canes and torrents of harsh words which he used on the students – Nincompoop! You stupid boy! You rascal! Bloody fool! Are you an imbecile?

Every student was afraid of Scubo because of his flogging. And not just because of his flogging. I guess there are people who have the gift of strangling or swallowing other people’s voices when they entered a room. Scubo had this gift, but of course not everybody’s voice would be strangled by the way.

Scubo never spoke to the students like a normal human being. He shouted. He gave instructions in shouts. Everything about him was unnecessarily manic, the way he walked, the way he spoke, the way he looked at the students, but Adaeze wasn’t going to have any of that. She wasn’t going to have anyone shove no spit into her mouth in the name of school security and control.

It was a cool Monday morning in class, and we had a free period. The teacher wasn’t around, and so our class prefect was telling everyone to lessen the noise, else he would be forced to write the names of noise makers. Nobody listened to him. The noise was too much, a collection of English and Igbo words melding together in the air.

That was when Adaeze walked in quietly. Nobody knew she had walked in until Scubo’s shouting voice appeared in our classroom. There was quiet immediately. On a normal day, Adaeze wasn’t known to be a troublemaker, wasn’t loud or boisterous. She was just a normal, cool girl who liked to mind her business.

“Where is that girl? Where is that stupid girl? Where is she?” Scubo shouted. His English had a heavy Igbo accent, and we always mimicked him in his absence, never in his presence. Our class prefect often said he couldn’t understand how our school director would employ an illiterate to work as school security.

Nobody said anything upon hearing Scubo’s voice. Adaeze sat on the pew where she normally sat. Scubo scanned the whole class with his eyes until he picked Adaeze. “Were you not the one I was calling?” he asked.

There was silence. Nobody spoke for seconds.

Scubo asked her the question again. “Excuse me, Sir?” she said with a tone that clearly showed that she was ready for anything that would follow as the consequence of her action.

“Are you stupid?” Scubo asked. “Are you talking to me in that manner?”

“I don’t understand what is happening, Sir. Nobody called me. Nobody called my name.”

“So you won’t answer if you didn’t hear your name?”

“People only respond to their names.”

“Oh. You senior students have started growing wings, abi? I called you and you refused to answer me.”

“Point of correction, Sir! Nobody called me. If I had heard my name, then I would have answered.”

Those words Point of correction, Sir! hewn out of Adaeze’s mouth stood heavy in the air. The audacity of the words, the fearlessness and the poise of it made everyone uneasy. Scubo raised his cane to flog Adaeze but she held the cane with her right hand. “You have no rights to flog me Sir. You did not call me, and there was no way I could answer to a call which did not exist.”

We all watched in astonishment. Later, we would hail Adaeze and tell her that she would make a great lawyer, but presently, we all kept quiet. We all knew what had happened even though we weren’t there when Scubo called Adaeze. Scubo never called anyone by name. It would have been nice if he tried to know the names of the students and call them by names just like the teachers did, but Scubo never called anyone by name, never even bothered to do so. What he often did was to holler “Hey you!” and then all the students would turn in panic, and then he would point to the offending student and say, “Come here!” If you hesitate or say, “Is it me, Sir?” Scubo would yell, “It is you I’m talking to, you Nincompoop!”

 Surely, Adaeze was in a big trouble, we thought. But Scubo walked out of the class without uttering another word. We waited for a retaliation, maybe Scubo would come back better armed. Maybe he would come back with more canes. Maybe he would invite the school director. But days passed, weeks walked past, and nobody mentioned Adaeze’s case again. Neither would Scubo come into our class to harass anybody again till we graduated. We gave Adaeze a nickname which she answered till we came out of secondary school. The nickname was “Point Of Correction”.

I was late to begin leaving for walking, so I checked the time of sunset to make sure I wouldn’t get caught in darkness. It said 6:08 was when the sun set. I had enough time. I turned off the tarot card reader I was listening to and got my boots and such on. A local golf course allowed dog walkers through the winter months. Some people said it was to keep coyotes away and some had the owner as doing this because his mother used to walk the dogs there and it was all to keep part of her memory going. 

The dogs were happy and safe, and socialized well if a bit zealously sometimes, with the others they encountered. I took the left side which was less populated overall, and at that time for half the walk, that half of the golf course, there was nobody. It was one of those moments prolonged where the three of us were content, moving, together, and were where and how we were supposed to be. 

I looked out far and far across the lands and could see an old and sad building, something from maybe the 1970’s and even the most positive soul would be hard-pressed to find something sanguine about. I was glad I was in the next town, even if the people were a little on the snobbish side. It got really quiet, with no wind and I just paused sometimes and admired this remarkable quietude. There was a copse of trees standing above the long and wide white snow, both the ground and trees completely untouched by anything in the world. It reminded me of something. I couldn’t recall what. Then it hit me. It was all there like some old Carlos Castaneda book cover. That led me to thinking of Castaneda. His personal narrative probably hadn’t been true, according to my research, but his writing was beautiful and interesting, and did contain much wisdom. So, it was up to the reader to determine what they thought of it all finally. His immediate group of people didn’t end well. But in another way he had inspired many and perhaps still does. 

I arrived at a little series of small streams. The dogs, a Collie and a Husky, didn’t bother much and stayed close enough. They were both good swimmers but I wouldn’t want them to go too close in the winter months. I stood on some planks and stared at the black water which to the sides looked grey and in other places clear. I liked the sound and to see it travelling. I began to feel better and better. It had been a long cold snow-laden winter but finally there were little signs that it might end one day. 

There was a distant bell I kept hearing then, and also a black squirrel I saw running across the way in the openness before disappearing into a stand of trees. An elderly lady appeared before me with her dog. The three dogs met and played somewhat. 

‘Your dogs are beautiful,’ she mentioned. I told her thanks. ‘My dog is a rescue,’ she continued, ‘and I think they know when they are becoming a rescue.’

‘Good for you,’ I told her, ‘for giving him a home and walks. I might not be out here walking if not for mine, ’cause it easy to make any one excuse not to go out. So I rescue them and they rescue me.’

‘Exactly.’

Then the lady coughed and had a hard time stopping. ‘It’s a cold I’m fighting. But I’ve had it since December.’ That was a few months, I thought to myself, and something, life experience, common sense, maybe some intuition or the manner she coughed in, told me it was pneumonia. 

‘I hope you feel better soon.’

We looked around and the dogs kept playing. ‘I better get going,’ I said. And I glanced back in a bit and consciously sent her any light and good intentions that I could in order to help her with the pneumonia and in life. She seemed like such a good soul. Soon her and her dog disappeared into the part of the path that entered a group of old trees in the other direction. 

I kept on. There was a long stretch and I realized for some reason, alone with my own thoughts, that I had never seen the golf course without snow, in the spring or summer. I thought it must look kind, relaxing, even inspiring for its vibrant verdancy and calm plainness. There was a bit of ice to navigate going up the long hill to our truck, and I went slow and cautiously. The dogs had no trouble at all, full of agility and youth, prowess, and such, that they were. 

Some friendly people passed me and I said hello. It was interesting that they were setting out then because it was beginning to get dark. At the top the canines and I, got into my vehicle. Driving home I thought of the other side of outside, of home. There would be puzzles and books, nice people and the fire. The fire was electric and had no hearth stone, but it was a modern world and that’s just how it went sometimes. I still liked it. 

Inside, I wrote this, careful not to upset the puzzle pieces. Periodically I glanced up to see the darkening sky turn from blue to darker blue and then, black. It was night. It was a day’s end. It was Sunday as a Sunday should be, peaceful and without dilemma. 6:08 EST had come and passed. And that is what I saw, did, and thought, while that winter sun was going down again. 

——