Ruth
Packet of the last seconds wins again, the ripe shine
honorific over that alleged clatter in the brick-lane
where some dimly familiar stood stock-still seconds
ago in a remnant downpour, gasping with effort
and pegged with sweat, her rake's overload
a self-savagery without sunburn, for it was
a punishment without being a nexus, for I will
always be happier she endured it than I now
do. The stumble-block to further sanctifaction
by remorse crops between phases of perception,
robs us of the burnishing of betterment that sat
formerly like an object on the table, a sign of old wealth
in the room perpetually visited on these wanders through
the stupefaction of over-idleness, I'll warrant
she deserved it and am glad she's over with it,
lascivious in the rain simmering through the screen
I see or avoid her with cruelty stagger on the stair,
penning the details only for commiseration by
dramatic recollection. When she does good I magnify her,
when she droops in pain I've clinched her and found
where the chink in the will can be stopped or split.
By this her joy--my jealousy, and I always suffer most,
needlepointing that jacquarded with memory
and dancing stitch-steps with pantomime
painted slowness over an enacted misery
no longer calculable in the present sage field:
until that fair coincidence of forms joined me
whose concurrence in difference frames this pity-play
with calls to temperance, and kindness to that
which is not immediate. I see I fail to change, to amend
and no longer boast the heirloom burning on the table,
but with what ecstasy in betterment by imposition of my
contemporary whose tenderness soars throughout these many stages
fixing the fibers that have unraveled
in the cold, in time, in my busy watch over that prolific
statuesque version always more real, I am more real
in this torsion to that suffering I can enact, fix.
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