The Drama of the Snow and Sebastian Sumac in that Season 

-words and picture by Brian Michael Barbeito 

It kept descending in the night, and for the most part, seemed like a wild secret or strange dream. It was pretty, certainly, like silent music orchestras floating around the industrial grade electric lights of town roads curt and organized or the playfully amidst Christmas bulbs residential and red, blue, yellow, green, and even purple. 

And there were dreams when Sebastian Sumac did fall asleep amidst his books. A Malcolm Lowry book, a Charlie Brown book called, You’ve Got a Friend Charlie Brown, and a few others. He dreamt of clothing and people that he had outgrown, situations that didn’t fit him anymore. The subconscious was figuring things out. Many of the dreams had him lost in large cities with multitudes around, a populace that he didn’t know or fit into. He tried always to find his way home, or a sympathetic soul, but rarely encountered either. 

And out there the winds northern blew the new snow to and from, and made wild crazed drifts across country roads, roads that had white outs for there was nothing to break or block the snow drifts. Finally, if one were travelling from the north to the south, the first structure of the town was an impossibly old church with stained yellow bricks, a marker of another time. It had a graveyard in the back with about thirty or forty souls buried and the stone markers though tall and well built, didn’t have the names any longer as time and seasons had eroded them. Now, each it was just a memory a soul anonymous, as perhaps little, or no other souls knew who the departed were. 

Then places where the nocturnal animals travelled widely. Deer. Coyote. Perhaps other things. Their tracks could be seen on the bright of days after the snowstorms and sometimes it seemed they had gone along the very middle of frozen streams, beige reeds, and bushes on the sides very still then in time like artifacts from photographs. Sebastian pictured them, and how beautiful all the creatures looked then, say, under the quiet bright moon and going along more like a painting or dream, a separate and somehow dignified world that little to nobody ever saw. 

Then the big box stores, their humungous parking lots, some abandoned vehicles on the edges and the odd large transport truck or trailer. The new world had taken over the old world and was spreading like a wave intent on overcoming coastlines and having the pulse and prowess of a seemingly infinite world behind it. Urban sprawl uniform and intentionally unoriginal, and each set of kilometres displaying a series of the same petrol stations and strip plazas and inhabitants also. 

In the days Sebastian, who had shed his old name and named himself after the trees that remained red deeply and always struck his consciousness in faraway meadows and fields in a benevolent manner. He had read that some cultures had even used the sumac for dye in clothing. In an ever changing world all one really had was oneself and oneself in that situation was like the sumac when it succeeded…colourful, upright, a unique phenomenon under the azure sky…all and everything peaceful and unique up the way from labyrinthine paths in the whimsical wondrous woodlands and far enough away from the sky infrastructure of troubled and over populated cities and towns. 

He stopped often and sat with a warm coffee. The shops had decorated the windows with stickers of towns themselves, towns decorated with trees and snowflakes. Again, the snow. He watched the sticker snow and the light sprinkles of snow arriving outside. And the patrons often talked of such also. ‘They are calling for more on Tuesday,’ or ‘Soon, like last year, we are going to run out of places to put it all…’ Some people were with friends and others with family, but Sumac was mostly alone. Alone with the vision of the snow, the idea of poems and travel logs or epistolary. And with the nights. The drama of dreams, books, and writing…and that snow…sometimes wafting down easily, like a languid journey being had, but also at moments fast, vexatiously even, in a rush, some gods of the other upper world intent on making winter a true winter certainty. 

Brian Michael Barbeito is a Canadian poet, writer, and photographer. His most recent book, a compilation of prose poems and landscape photography, is titled The Book of Love and Mourning.