antepenultimate

antepenultimate \an-tee-pi-NUHL-tuh-mit\, adjective:

1. Third from the end.
2. Of or pertaining to an antepenult. 

noun:
1. An antepenult.

I was my parent's antepenultimate child.
-- dls, the blog of dlsesh1

The vengeful eagles of the open sequence [and] the birds of augury watched outside the library and the emblematic kinsmen who shake 'the wings of their exultant and terrible youth' in the antepenultimate entry in Stephen's diary.
-- James Joyce, introduction by Hugh Kenner, Ulysses

But all day that is how it is, from the first tick to the last tack, or rather from the third to the antepenultimate, allowing for the time it needs, the tamtam within, to drum you back into the dream and drum you back out again.
-- Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier

Waiting on the Corners

Waiting on the Corners
by Donald Hall

Glass, air, ice, light,
and winter cold.
They stand on all the corners,
waiting alone, or in
groups that talk like the air
moving branches. It
is Christmas, and a red dummy
laughs in the window
of a store. Although
the trolleys come,
no one boards them,
but everyone moves
up and down, stamping his feet,
so unemployed.
They are talking, each of them,
but it is sticks and stones
that hear them,
their plans,
exultations,
and memories of the old time.
The words fly out, over
the roads and onto
the big, idle farms, on the hills,
forests, and rivers
of America, to mix into silence
of glass, air, ice, light,
and winter cold. 

"Waiting on the Corners" by Donald Hall, from Old and New Poems. © Ticknor & Fields, 1990

Autumn Ivy

Even as it envelops me
it is not mine, this autumn: 
that wind blowing through 
   the pines,
I regret how it makes them fall
-- the leaves, the scarlet leaves
   of ivy.

Autumn Ivy
Ogata kenzan, japanese, 1663-1743
Hanging scroll, ink color, and gold on paper
8 1/4 x 10 7/8 in., after 1732
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

douce

douce \doos\, adjective:

Sedate; modest; quiet.

“So should I have been, in my interview with Sir Thomas— how shall I put it— more douce?”
-- Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

Port Glasgow is to the east of Greenock, Gourock to the west. The latter town combines a douce middle-class residential area and a Ken MacLeod.
-- Edited by Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Nineteenth Annual Collection

Douce comes from the French word of the same spelling meaning "sweet." It became widely used in English after it was used in the Chanson of Roland, a epic poem written about Charlemagne.