Mortal Thoughts

At twelve, a reader of the martyr's lives,
I imagined my own body likewise
Flayed, starved, boiled, my mouth filled to the brim
With molten lead, my eyes stamped out like fires.

To be a grass: that would be good, I thought.
No pain. And when we got to single-celled,
Spineless breeds in sixth-grade science class
(Timothy H. across the aisle, leering,
Miming kisses), the life of an amoeba
Seemed just fine. It didn't even hurt to think
What brief, orgasmic shudder it would take
To shut such evanescence down.

Each morning,
I'd fish my wary pre-pubescent image
Out of the mirror, thinking with some triumph,
Some desperation, I'm still here!

I'm still here:
And like the saint enamored of the rack
That slowly winds her toward salvation,
I'm tethered to this turning earth
Where love in all its dangerous forms is made.

Valedictorian

Your Mozart is not my Mozart anymore.
That hour has passed,
The harmony that thrilled us, the false sun
We warmed to. Your days are yours now
To pile up like dry leaves in your past, from which my past

Has broken off, diverged, gone
Into another woods altogether. No, I cannot make my way over
To you, to touch your face or other parts, not even those whose ache
I can feel at the great distance
That has fallen between us like a world.

I have measured the hours and days since we touched.
Each one healed as I handled it. In them grew this voice, still singing
Out of doubt and longing, a stricken sound.

You are struck from the record. Your hand, absolved
Of my flagrant touch. Dismantle the room
Where we've become marble figures, a white
Sculptured kiss; where we sat listening
To your Mozart, not mine.

CLARE ROSSINI won the 1996 Akron Poetry Prize for her book, Winter Morning with Crow, chosen by Donald Justice.  A native of St. Paul, Clare Rossini is an assistant professor of English at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and a member of the faculty at Vermont College's low-residency MFA program. She completed her BA at the College of St. Benedict, before taking an MFA at the University of Iowa and a PhD at Columbia University, where she won the Bennett Cerf Award for Poetry an an Academy of American Poets Prize.

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