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.