Poet's Choice

just audible in the front row; to be a part of it,

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a body part of it. The thought I want to have

undoes itself again. You go ahead and think it for me.

I guess I never wanted it. I think that may be why

I had to tell you. Here, take this from me.

You'll think of something. Please. This is as far as I go.

"Alas poor whoozis" propels a slide toward the outrageous death-jokes of "my still humming skull" and "it's killing me." These suitably theatrical jokes and hi-jinks, like Hamlet's musing on the skull of Yorick the jester, link the limits of memory with the limits of life itself. By closing with the seven little words that hand over the anecdote and the search for that actor's name, giving them to the reader, Rosser makes a final allusion to mortality, in the mordant, laughing tradition of Shakespeare's graveyard scene.

(Jill Rosser's poem "Unthought" can be found in her book "Foiled Again." Ivan R. Dee. Copyright 2007 by J. Allyn Rosser.)