Come Unto These Yellow Sands Read Online Free

he’d grown more interested in who Max was when he wasn’t with Swift, but he’d run into the amiable but impenetrable barriers Max kept firmly in place between them.
    He knew the basics, of course. He knew Max was forty-five, in excellent health, had never been married, and voted Independent. He was easy to talk to and a good listener. He sang in the shower in a pleasant baritone and rarely got the words right. He couldn’t cook to save his life but he enjoyed eating, and to compensate for it put in time at the gym and went running on the mornings he didn’t wake up in Swift’s bed. He followed sports—baseball and football in particular. He liked soul music. Most important, he had never heard of SSS and the last time he’d read a poem was probably in Mother Goose.
    “I’ll have to get mine to go,” Max said, jogging down the staircase.
    “Ready and waiting.” Swift took a mouthful of coffee, watching—appreciating—as Max strode into the kitchen area. An ex-jock, Max moved well, with a careless, athletic ease.
    Picking up his yellow mug, Max downed his coffee in three giant swallows. He scooped up the paper towel wrapping his toast, pausing in front of Swift long enough to give him a coffee-tasting peck.
    “No cinnamon on mine?”
    “Nope. Have a good day,” Swift said.
    “I’ll see you.”
    Swift nodded. Max usually left it like that. Sometimes they made plans but just as often it was left to chance. The fact that chance usually led them to each other’s bed might mean something—or it might not.
    Today Max would be busy with his murder case.
    And so would Swift.

Chapter Three
     
    You are an underwater explorer. You’ve just accepted your most challenging assignment. To find the ancient vanished city of Atlantis lost far beneath the waves.
    Or maybe you’re just a sleep-deprived, under-caffeinated college professor with rain trickling down the back of your neck as you swim—er, sprint—from your car to your classroom clear on the other side of campus.
    Normally Swift didn’t mind the rain. He liked water. He’d been born underwater. His parents—literary icons Norris Swift and Marion Gilbert Swift—had wanted their only offspring to experience a childhood rich in sensory and cultural stimulation. They had documented, both in film and poetry, nearly every moment of Swift’s childhood journey. From tadpole to poet in his own right, it was all there for anyone who wanted to know—and was a regular subscriber to PBS.
    It was a peculiar thing to grow up in the public eye. It was a still-weirder thing to serve as the living, breathing form of inspiration for two of the greatest poets in North America. Sometimes, when Swift had been much younger, it had been hard to separate who he was from who everyone else thought he was. He’d seen home movies of himself at eighteen months sitting inside a giant watermelon and trying to eat his way out, of being dipped in watercolor and crawling over canvasses. He’d swum with dolphins at age eight and drank wine at his parents’ dinner parties at ten. His godfather had been the Poet Laureate William Stafford, and according to family legend, Anne Sexton had once babysat him while Marion Swift was accepting a gold medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
    No wonder Swift had been doing drugs by the time he was seventeen.
    That was the year he’d also scored the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for Black Solstice, his first book of poems. BS , as he’d come to think of it, had gone on to win the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He’d followed that success a year later with Cuckoo Shells , which had pretty much summed up his state of mind. CS had been critically lauded but had failed to score any major awards. Swift had been certain his career was over. Maybe it would have been better for everyone if it had been.
    He’d sought comfort in more chemical relief. A lot of chemical relief. By the time he was nineteen he had learned to deal with the