Diderot’s Stroll       I tried to go for a walk today but the high tide washed away the alphabet.   So I picked up a stone that contained “all the shape and hardness of the world” and threw it as far as I could into the muted surf.   The ripples reached foreign shores, sparking beautiful conversations in languages I could not understand.   Disappointed, I walked into a bank, tried to withdraw a dictionary or at best a thesaurus, but instead witnessed logic and reason dissecting beauty with a penknife on the teller’s linoleum counter top.   Outside on the sidewalk pigeons shimmied up the steel legs of a wheelchair. I checked the water once again as I crossed the bridge but only rainbow oil slicks and rainbow boats ferried more languages I could not understand.   Amongst the driftwood and crumpling sheet metal there were a million lives doing a million important things but lightly stepping, crushing them, carelessly putting out a cigarette, I still felt cheated out of a walk.   One was not enough so I lit another and inhaled and exhaled and inhaled and cursed the rising tide and dreamed of yellow rubber boots and tried ever so hard to quiet the smoke.   I tried to return home but a freight train derailed my thoughts.   I took the tulip from my pocket, brushed off the lint, held it up to the conductor’s nose and asked: “Can you hear it?”   To my surprise she said she could. In celebration we chinked our glasses. She kept gin hidden in her pinstriped overalls and even though her interpretation was different from mine it was still an interpretation.   I visited friends at the Railway Club congratulating them on their hiring practices all the while condemning the sea for its stubborn naturalness.   When the ripples had finally rebounded from exciting foreign shores I immediately picked them up and translated them into this: “Stop throwing stones” or “Please do not feed the fish.”   I called up everyone in the phonebook under “A” to sign a petition that read: write, but the mayor said I was being too lettrist and proceeded to hold a pancake breakfast for everyone from B to Z. “Leave the politics to the A’s” he said. It turns out the conversation was dull without the A’s, and no one liked the pancakes at all. In the end the petition was signed by everyone from A to Z. When I finally had it rolled up, tied with a sexy red ribbon, fit into a bottle with a fresh cork and placed in the sea, I waited, in vain, for high tide to wash it up somewhere else — at the edge of horizon even the alphabet is different.       - Nicholas Hauck