Both Slyly Autobiographical and Utterly Fictive

Early snow jars my sense of intimacy, leaves me angry in prayer and indifferent to the untidiness of my surroundings. At dawn brook trout leap briefly from dark currents, plashing back in a brief flash of silver. If only I had planted more pumpkins! The letter grows paragraph by paragraph by paragraph until it resembles a novel, one that is both slyly biographical and utterly fictive. Meanwhile, smoke unfurls from the crumbling chimney, its faint shadow crossing the barn like Heaven pleading its case to an agnostic. You wonder what they think about and how their thinking appears to them and yet you can't wonder too much or too deeply or else you'd never kill them, let alone eat them all winter long. It is a yet a dream to meet her but in dreams now all we do upon meeting is hold one another and sway quietly fully clothed in an unlit room on the second floor of a motel in western New York that next week will close for the season. I'm cold - are you cold? And all the other ways we have of confusing the signal for that from which the signal came so clearly, once upon a time.

Our Long Desired Conjoinment

n my dream you were a window through which sunlight streamed like an fulsome tide, knocking me to the ground, and in the sudden horizontaling I saw that I was in the highest room of a tall tower, and that the story I had long told myself about imprisonment and suffering was a lie. Despite the midnight cold we go outside to gaze admiringly at the moon, its light doubly reflective on early crusted snow cracking like a rifle underfoot. Impatience as a form of self-defense against psychological pain at last evaluated for the pain it causes others. While everyone laughed and played word games at a pie-covered table, I drank tea in a corner and looked at pictures of my dead father post-stroke. What do you see when you see a prism and is the prism an observer too? Frost flowers ascend the north-facing panes, witnesses to an order that it is not indifferent to beauty, and thus implies that love may yet assume our long-desired conjoinment. Twice in the past week I turned west and thought about just driving and twice I said no for good-enough reasons. One pities the many dead animals and yet cheerfully gorges on their roasted bodies, doesn't one. In terms of love, the trick is to not rise too quickly but rather cherish falling, and see who - if anyone - joins you on the rough boards.