  A simple confining separable interaction Ansatz for the rainbow-ladder
truncated QCD Dyson-Schwinger equations is used to study quark deconfinement
and meson states at finite temperature. The model is fixed at T=0 to implement
quark confinement while preserving the Goldstone mechanism for the $\pi$.
Within the Matsubara formalism, a very slow temperature dependence is found for
the $\pi$ and $\rho$ meson masses $M_H(T)$ until near the deconfinement
temperature $T_c=143$ MeV. Related to rapid decrease of the
dynamically-generated quark mass function for $T>T_c$, this model produces
$\pi$ and $\rho$ masses that rise significantly and are better interpreted as
spatial screening masses. The $T$-dependent screening mass defect $\Delta M_H =
2\pi T-M_H(T)$ is compared to results of lattice gauge theory simulations and
also to those of an infrared dominant analytic model.
