Clare Rossini

COFFEE ON THE STOOP

In the yard across the way, the neighbor’s cat—
the obese orange one
with chronically twitching tail—

toys with something once feathered.
A sparrow?
Gone, anyway, and the cat clearly joyed with the kill.

It seems the bird was entered into the great plan
as a thing to die
in another creature’s mouth,

And I, as a thing to watch and muse, exonerated
by the fence between.
Isn’t this why we try to think

ourselves beyond nature?
Wanting truths more pliant, wisdoms mired
in ambiguity’s fecund muck.  But—

face it—Nature’s nothing
if not crude.
It’s Big Swallows Little.   Cold Equals Death.

It’s Water Me, and I Will Grow.

Author: Clare Rossini

Clare Rossini’s third collection, Lingo, was published by University of Akron Press. Her poems and essays have appeared in such venues as The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review,  Ploughshares, Poetry, and the Best American Poetry series. The Poetry of Capital, an anthology Rossini co-edited, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2021.  After forty-plus years of college teaching, she has just retired as Artist-in-Residence in the English Department at Trinity College.

Plume: Issue #143 July 2023