THE MAGNET
by Ruth Stone (1915-)

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 the thicket he leaped, through the 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 hoarse 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, and they danced, 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 woods 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 the brambles, through the narrow forests, I bid my nights unwind,
I bid my days turn back, I broke my windows, I unsealed my locks.



Click here to hear her read her poems. (Photo via NPR.)
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