The Magnet

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.