Exhibit A; the edge of this long knife:
Earth broken into hard, exquisite mood:
A blameless subtlety compelled to brood
Unwittingly against the flesh of life.

Exhibit B; the face of this dead girl
Repenting in a lonely glen for weeks,
With feelings still confessing on the cheeks
Turned into rotten dreams of green and pearl.

Her eyes reveal the bulging rendezvous
Where thieves and cherubs, caught by emptiness,
Gave up their fight and merged into a guess
Concerning shadows just beyond their view.

Her lips, once gossiping and vixenish,
Have stiffly drawn apart and indicate
A drolly stifled yielding to their fate,
As though they strove to speak an insane wish.

Exhibit C; the man who strangled her
Because her mangled, wrangling heart became
A greedy spectre, threatening him with shame;
Transforming heart and mind to one, crude blur.

And when she cried: “You've got to marry me
Or else I'll tell my father what you did,”
The meanly squirming, childish sentence slid
Within his hands and made them wild and free.

He sits now in a vapid rooming-house
And spies a form upon the empty bed.
One spot of dread moves slowly on his head,
Like some invisible, resistless louse.

His fingers itch to capture it, and steal
Now on his eyes, now on his parted lips.
It crawls away from them and once more grips
More than his skin and more than pain can feel.

Denouncing platitudes, Jehovah's wrath,
And frenzied self-defences huddled close
Within his heart grow suddenly morose,
As though they longed for some escaping path.

And then he whispers: “She was nagging me.
If she had only kept her damn tongue still.”
And for an instant new resentments kill
The swollen wraiths of guilt and perfidy.