The Magnet

Ruth Stone

I loved my lord, my black-haired lord, my young love
Thin faced, pointed like a fox,
And he, singing and sighing, with the bawdy went crying
Up the hounds, through thicket he leaped, through bramble,
And crossed the river on rocks.
And there alongside the sheep and among the ewes and
     lambs,


   With terrible sleep he cunningly laid his hoax.

   Ah fey, and ill-gotten, and wicked his tender heart,
   Even as they with their bahs and their niggles, rumped up
         the thistle and bit
   With their delicate teeth the flowers and the seeds and the
         leaf,
   He leaped with a cry as coarse as the herders, "Come, I will
         start,
   Come now my pretties, and dance, to the hunting horn and
         the slit
   Of your throbbing throats, and make me a coat out of grief."
   And they danced, he was fey, they did dance, and the coat
. they made
   Turned all of an innocent mind, and a single love, into beasts
         afraid.

   Was it I called him back? was it hunger? was it the world?
   Not my tears, not those cries of the murdered, but twas the
        fox
   Hid in the wood who called, and the smell of the fox, burned
        in his mind,
   The fox in his den, smiling, around his red body his fine
        plume curled,
   Out of the valley and across the river, leaving his sheep's
        hair, he left the maligned flocks,
   I heard him coming through brambles, through narrow
        forests, I bid my nights unwind,
   I bid my days turn back, I broke my windows, I unsealed
        my locks.