Nippy

Was not the hounds that wore Actaeon out,
Tubbily biscuit-sated, fondly warm,
Kitchen-scrap merchants cut back for the shoot,
It fell out so.

The earth-born hunter, straying for a mark,
The queen at chaste ease in her ordered park
(Whose order is a forest, eases such
As boars might shun and tigers barely touch);

Actaeon takes the crazy pavementing
Over a root above a cache of snails,
The hoof, the green-gyration, and the trails,
Unknown to Cynthia’s lodge’s casementing –

(Which is of glinty moss and blue-black sedge)
- it is a morning outing, and in light
Vegetable-dappled, is she blotched aright,
So that the lunatrix spreads in hell’s hedge –

She sees him see. Grey eyes gulf out. She smiles in courtesy,
But shivers with such mortal effort, sways half down and coughs,
A bronchial clarion whose sympathy spins him from his firm seat –
“And love?” he says in quiet.

The trigger wording for the bloody batch,
And baying as they ferry on a catch,
Their fast-bred haunches and their slavening jaws.
The nymphs, Actaeon eaten, became whores.