L. Ron Hubbard appears in the syrupy sky above the motel like an American-Indian thunderbird. I'm partially in love with imagining my wife is a policeman's wife. My wife came without a dowry, except for a wonderful set of tits and a Yorkie named for Emma Bovary. The lawn is hers. On airplanes, I'm surprised how many swimming pools dot the suburbs. Cold turquoises; the raised gold title of L. Ron Hubbard's book glimmers on the dash. The Principles of Dianetics (the body is not the person) and the horizon thickens; the blood red sky and all-night sign; Turquoise. Pools of it, having me know I could've been counted among those who took slaves in the Belgian Congo and among those who offed their wives to clear space for more beautiful girls. Because ever so slowly linoleum warps and sheet rock moistens on Black Hawk Island and lichens grow and we're not getting any younger I want to give her a party with luminarias and tiny sandwiches but she watches and waits and won't even let me warm up her coffee. * Already I have been to the continents of South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Many more than you. On that last continent it isn't snowing isn't snowing isn't snowing all winter long. Australia is brim with things that do not visit upon us, including the extinct Christmas island rat and the Fourth of July. * It is cold and other things you'd expect: green apples, hurricane glass. There is nothing to read, and drowned trees. Your horned glasses and typewriter are laid out just so, and I want to light the stove. * The saw-whet owl is named after a saw whet. The peregrine falcon is named after a manner of travel. Like you, I have spent my life on nothing      but I am happy, like Confucius says,      to know the names of a few things. * There is a litter of sunk ships in the deep water off Door County, Wis. It is a kind of Bermuda Triangle, or Mermaid Ave. Here is a short list of things that float up when ships sink: wooden stools, guitars, lightbulbs, bars of soap. Surely you can look past my mistakes and see a young man trapped on the ice     comforting his dog team because there is nothing left to eat. There is nothing     but French philosophy when I look into the black universe. As memory serves,     standing in the cold aurora of an open refrigerator dressed in the t-shirt of my     alma mater, is me, no fairer than Nathan Bedford Forrest     bivouacked with his gun-broke horses, with his charlatan affectations.     Somewhere along the way I did not come into a lot of money and set out on     an eccentric wish I've always had, upon which I perish in an underrated storm.     It is very like me to like it very much to see them, Nicaraguan students     wearing ski masks heaving things-on-fire. It is not my place not to like to see it.     We hate to see a horse killed in battle, for example. Of the bounteous earth     I mean, and takething away. The devotion animals show  is too painful     to watch. I would prefer it there were no animals almost.