Habit's Rabbet

Habit’s Rabbet

And why unblooms the best hope has ever sown?

--Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,

And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan....

These purblind doomsters had as readily strown

Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

                                                            Hap

                                                            Thomas Hardy

Memory wears a black suit

and shores and up in the dark

when the feast is long done

and the poorer bones are picked

and licked and cracked

and licked memory takes

off her coat and shoes

and casts them across the sooty arm 

chari and floor, pocket side up, shine

of the bootblack handkerchief all

dull in the glut of frey.  The pocket’s 

the only door in the room.

And it’s this that has to open,

bring out the trinkets, although by

the end of the night they'll be 

scattered and memory will be naked

in your bed and you will have

fucked her or she

will have fucked you, or,

if you’re both on speaking terms

tonight, taken your time with

the whole thing

and started where you got

off last night.

After Wrath

After-wrath

Beautiful, beautiful

Magnificent desolation

                                Mary Ruefle

Ice is a caught frieze of wind and to see it ripple hard

in a winter day undripping liquid from the stiff-solid

rot of the eaves it's like when brief thew is pricked

beneath brand new breast feathers that cover  

the exposed yoke of allotrope a lode inside

his very own coal so thick so viscous

it would never not ever in that million

year cliché run out of rub and go completely

chaff and because of the pain of being so

long chaste to it—to sit after under the long tooth

of his pronged skies and see what’s stuck

to the roof to see it and with luck

a whole row of soldiers bared to

the only power in the world given

to reboot them thicken them with ripple

and gorge and watch that last

drop pause so long it can’t go but get itself

froze and such as these

beneath the eaves a set of teeth a son

is jealous of in his brief rage because they

are out and he is in and even jabs and upper

cuts are out of reach in this prison so only

inside is he to open the unbarred

window and pluck the thing

lovely and rather stunted too stunted

to smash and besides he is past that now

that’s all gone and been given in by whetted

teeth and tongue tip sticking to lick this fire