It’s what I most remember as I leave
the concert hall—ending that prompts beginning,
echo that owns the power to receive
my question “why” and keep my senses spinning.
Simplicity defied, it can unfold
into an origami chandelier
and then a lunar landscape—silent, cold
enough to make me ask what landed here.

Borrowing shape from words, this wordless sound
blossoms into a solitary rose
whose petals break away, scatter around
the hall. Did you imagine it would close
once woodwinds, brass, and drums were on the shelf?
It only now begins to be itself

Claudia Gary lives near Washington DC and teaches workshops on Villanelle, Sonnet, Natural
Meter, Poetry vs. Trauma, and the science of poetry at writer.org, currently via teleconference.
Author of Humor Me (2006), and of chapbooks including Genetic Revisionism (2019) and Bikini
Buyer’s Remorse (2015), she is also a health science writer, visual artist, and composer of tonal
chamber music and art songs. See pw.org/content/claudia_gary; follow @claudiagary.