Clare Rossini

From a Bench at MOMA

Don’t wanna, don’t wanna,

I really don’t want to go

Into the next room, don’t want to see

The red and yellow and blue

Rectangles and squares

Hemmed in by black lines.  They’re beautiful

In their way, another day

And I would be theirs, drifting

One to the next, an empiricist who dissects to know

A primary Jehovah.

Wanna stay, wanna stay

Here on this bench, the woman

Next to me feeding a child from her breast.  I hear

His suck and swallow

As I wade into the pond before me,

Three canvases wide.   The water rises around

The ankles and knees of my sight, the scumbled strokes,

Glazy-thin washed ones–

Here’s a leaf

Squiggled greenly, right out of the tube,

There’s a lily, haute-pink, flaming against

The wandering, watery blues

Darkening as nakedness might.  I’m floating

Now, floating toward the far, deep end

Onto which something tall

Has thrown its shade, O

Lavender-leaf-water god

For whom the votive lilies are burning.

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 #16 October 2012