Through the sand drag a magnet;
Iron filings align;
Through the words drag a rhyme:
Quartz, chalcedony, agate.
In the sound, weight a line;
Whole schools will be caught in a dragnet,
And scales will be wrack at
The shoreline to lap and combine:
Singing, tinted, syntactic.
Iron filings align;
From the shaft of a feather or mine,
The mineral fur —
The nap with the burr —
Feels jagged;
Fragments are attracted
Where flesh tears away from the spine,
Painful and dark, but texture is revealed
In tracks of force, in the arcs of the field,
By oxides of iron feel briar and Byron extracted
On the tip of your tongue, hooks have snagged it
When through words you drag a magnet.