They May Only Go Where They’re Bid

On my ride I carried no bread in my pocket,

for I had never known these roads to be haunted.

The wet-black cobbles sighed a cold mist, and it coalesced

as a form by the roadside, stile-still and waiting.

Something to spook hounds and horses, something fey

and quick to send me tumbling groundward.

What but witchcraft could unhorse me?

What could knock me lame and blind to all but the sharp lines

of her face, the folds of slate-colored silk

in the dress she wears like a glamour?

She speaks only truth as the fair folk are bid to,

and her honesty is a blade, her voice

a swallowed quiverful of arrows

aimed at eye and heart, thunking home.

Years, I've run the globe like a treadmill, always one stride

ahead of summer, all its birds and freedom.

So I send her from the study: Put Adele to bed, I say, and she smiles

a patient splinter-smile and rises as if gravity has no hold.

I was of a mind to be wrenched open. If she’d asked,

I would have sprung to my feet and danced till both ankles broke under me.

Her magic was in having none. She was an unwitting knife, stainless

and unused to flesh. And so I set to stropping.