I found a murder in my drawer, underneath the heaped corduroys. It was an eye and parts. I shoved it in my pocket, exulting. It was mine, mine. I sent the now exhausted drawer shut.

Days passed, the murder imposed its need. I began inspecting the byways for a Murderer. In my pocket as the murder was.

I found him in a barn, reposed upon hay solar yellow in its cubes. The Murderer hunched, divested among the shifting cows. I pulled the murder free. It came untangled from my pocket’s roots and toppled loose upon my melty child-white palm.

I sticked it to the Murderer’s lapel.

Then the Murderer dogged my steps, he was appreciating, gaga. His soup glare fishingly skipped about the surface of my face. Parting and unbuttoning, he glid his implement into me to perishing. In wild lax licking of lips and vanishing, the image of the waterfall that spits light and tumbles semen, that sunmade image goes dark.

We came to live together in my digs. I was his be held, having been held, going to be held; he happened every day. The murder was a ball, glossy and aware, violently.

*  *  * 

On foot through moon-knit wheatfields, wheat beards moonedly grey as elevated by our thinking of gold, as we know wheat gold by the sun’s eye, we paired walked. We paired were livid in the moon’s light that felled the wheat’s blush, murdered it of its gold. The night was chill as we paired bled felt; chill then, though, there, was thrilling, an intimate scrape on the sole of the foot, was a wetness.

Came we unto Death. Death was an unco sofa. We approached it on our knees, we paired rocked like fat matrons bundled into winter coats. And a sofa is the smile that eats; and a butt the smile that kissed that smile; and a smile is a crude line drawing of a thing once spotted winging past in the sky, of a bird’s not our joy, is a parabola; and we are things low to the ground

 

we circumambulate Death

 

sweet wardrobe whose clothes, whose swish and fondle of clothes split onto a bedroom’s light

 

Death is a metaphor for

 

a table on which green plates are laid

young girls with plump and unlined knees are opened

and

 

Death lies on/in their loins. My Murderer gave It the marble. He said,

 

“I loved thee for thy

beautiful eyes, mellifluous ears and fragrant nose, oh

livid lover, beloved liver of unspun time that rounded

in thee, beat time in timpanied thee,

thou standing river of blood, oh bed of jumps

of blood, oh site.” I sighed and

 

went in Death, pursuing the marble. All the world turned into My Loved Estranged oh lost and walked away. I saw hay, caked hooves of the significant acts, and falling. I was muttering black and my final water. Sun closing its jaws and no mystery darkened its golden toils and tongues, its obvious heat. I saw until it was not seeing.

Oh, it was a fine Death, it had paid its way, now nothing and its garden with appropriate flowers. It had raised its Christmas lamb and et the meat of it. Whose drawer I had been in (the murder’s, its warm and oak-smelling drawer) for its pregnancy.

Sandra Newman’s most recent novel is The Country of Ice Cream Star (Ecco Press).

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