Maryann Corbett

Alumni Magazine: Class Obituaries

a bouts-rimés on Shakespeare’s sonnet 5

On separate pages, each in its black frame:

faces of classmates dead. Stop there. Now dwell

on age and loss. You are, and aren’t, the same

as that green graduate, furious to excel,

who Was. But here’s bright memory, flickering on:

Views from a third-floor dorm room shimmer there

in the mind’s eye, although the dorm is gone.

Crape myrtle and magnolia everywhere

scent those recalled all-nighters, fragrance left

muted, like perfume stored in stoppered glass.

Breathe now. Even bereaved, you’re not bereft

of what you knew. Remember how it was,

since memory alone is where you meet

those days, those nights when even pain was sweet.

Maryann Corbett is the author of six books of poems, most recently The O in the Air from Colosseum Books / Franciscan University Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Image, Raritan, and many other journals, and in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and Best American Poetry 2018. She is a past winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize.