(to you, the murderer)

The Navajo pilots strike me as odd, remarked the murderer. You weren't sure, the A-10s and prop-jets, the Quechua parasails. Just saw them flying. You said, "the murderer, you are odd, and strike me as so, so we're walking." You two were walking down the plaited grain near the river, mortar and pestle. You were making bread and the murderer was coaxing a blue warbler with some seeds. "With some seeds I will make lines," said the murderer. All the pastels and pixels as the planes passed.


To you, the murderer,
an arch in the stone. An
ache in the gland.


Your naked body is aspen. I saw the grain you ground on the ground, and took it to the table. We were still making bread, dead or not. Dada or datum. There was a mound of asparagus and I remembered how you'd pronounced it "asparagus" and I'd pronounced it "asparagus" and I wrote "asparagus." Sometimes you dreamt in béisbol. Some tools you used looked like polyps.


You can talk just like me.


The murderer had taken to the trains, and had become a consolidator of loquats, a sufferer of lockjaw. He canned the loquats in tin cans and pinned his jacket to the road. It was wearying. The murderer came through my town, once, as I tended wheat and rye, tended to pour streams across the sandstone, he came through and passed, like a bus stop, really, but probably more like a fox. Like jets and jest.


He stayed to the trains, writing on the cars and your name. He reminded me of a tortoise, or maybe of your nape. His graffiti wasn't very neat, overspray sprayed across some other writer's name and I think he was eventually killed.