ARCHIVES Claudia Gary EPO Poems Prior to 2023

THE LYRE SPEAKS TO ORPHEUS

My strings, these aged-lace filaments, emerge
out of the twirled strands of your DNA.
I am both mutinous and a wild mutant
that intervenes in procreation, draws
spikes of your energy into my art.

A glimmer—no, a bolt—of golden lightning
retunes my strings until the wind accepts
their music. Did you know, out of the shades
and tangled roots your struggle left behind,
my true song would be you?

 

FIELD TRIP

In white on green, the town’s name
keeps taunting me until
one day I take the exit
as reminiscers will.

Close to a run-down farmstand
a stately pathway roams
to the old house, its fields now swapped
for ordinary homes.

I think of stepping out for air.
But then what would I see?
Not you, nor what I once lost there:
the dust version of me

preserved inside a lacquered box
someday to be an urn.
And all that I once found there—
believing stars would turn

their jaded eyes to nonpareils,
auras to bells and candy fluff—
was just enough.

MORE EXCERPTS FROM EPICURIGRAMS

Graffiti for Grapefruit

You are the key to morning,
my sweet and not-so-sweet.
One kiss with little warning
rallies me from defeat,
from days stumbling back-assward.
Your tart taste is the password.

Cholent

I think I’ll be fiendish
and cook them a bean dish.

Learned the Hard Way

Though carrot juice’s gifts are wondrous,
an overdose can mimic jaundice.


Kindness

Honey creates a sticky mess.
Let it be milk—no more, no less.

A (GOLD) FISH STORY

A team from Ben-Gurion University has successfully taught goldfish to maneuver a robotic car on land.
 

The poor creature was barely alive,
but a scientist wished her to thrive.
So he built her a classy
new tank with a chassis
and lovingly taught her to drive.

____________

COLLAGE
         for B.

As family clippings and photographs rush from your center
to each edge of the canvas, you wait for a meaning to enter
these scraps of ephemera gathering lace in the orbit
that surrounds you, before all their textures and shapes can absorb it.
More colors and words will arrive at the end of the day
once you’ve quieted, once all the images learn to obey.

And the trouble with being the glue is that as you are holding
their lives from a growing abyss, from disasters unfolding,
you run into gaps, and spread to envelop each small
universe with your smooth benefaction—protecting them all—
but you cannot maintain a clear system or form of your own
without clamping and pooling and pulling unknowns from the known.

LUNA-SEE

We gaze through willow boughs and swoon:
cottage cheese clouds have veiled the moon.

Softly the moon peers down and sees
poets who swoon at cottage cheese.

And if our brains are as she's heard,
she winks at us, whispers, "large curd!"

EXCERPTS FROM EPICURIGRAMS
 

Broccoli Ex Post Facto

Her trick, to make me savor it,
was saying “Look, your favorite!”
And soon it was,
with butter sauce,
even without.
There is no doubt
I owe my health
to Grandma’s stealth.

Yogurt Unmasked

The kind with sugared fruit jam at its base,
or even coffee syrup, had a place
at home and school. It took me years to see
that yogurt—plain—might feed longevity.
For granting bones and stomach such a favor,
I’ve learned to love its tart, peculiar flavor.

Ode To An Everything Bagel

Delicious inclusivity, whose mound
of hummus, or cream cheese with Nova Scotia,
complements seeds, grains, onion strips well browned—
I don’t care whether you’re halal or kosher

.

A DIALOGUE BARELY OVERHEARD

      Spider:
Bright beings, self-propelled,
enter my ghostly web.
What fervor as they meld!
What flavor as they ebb!

      Fly:
My friends and I abhor
this web where you preside,
licking your chops for more.
I hope we won’t collide.

____________________

ODD VIBRATIONS 
	After an earthquake, Aug. 9, 2020,
	with a line from the Beach Boys

I hear the sound of a gentle word—
but in the Carolinas it’s a shout,
five on the Richter scale, overheard

under our feet, under tree and bird,
secluded pasture, marble tile and grout.
During the sound of that gentle word

feathers and fur also monitored
a strange disturbance. Darting in and out,
they don’t need Richter. They’ve overheard

acres of skeletons, disinterred
among the bougainvillea strewn about,
mocking the sound of my gentle word

over and over. Have we preferred
to sing of indignation, pain, and doubt—
nine on the Richter scale? Overheard

mutterings say we have grown absurd.
I search along the fault line for a route		
back to the sound of a gentle word.			
Richter can’t scale what I’ve overheard.

LOVE DURING COVID

Could it have been a whimsical response,
an inflammation swirling through our nerves
to heart and brain? We did seem happy once

but hit a muscle wall’s intolerance
to all but flight. If my memory serves,
love may have been a whimsical response

to multiple stress fractures—circumstance
that could have leached our cellular reserves
longer, collapsing hearts and brains at once.

Respite from chaos now offers a chance
to flatten out our roller coaster’s curves
and COVID’s. Unpredictable response 

spilled peace of mind into a cup—an ounce,
versus the lake that each of us deserves.
And yet some hearts are full: look at the ones

who quarantine together, who announce
engagements, photograph perfect hors d’oeuvres.
Are all their loves a whimsical response
of heart and brain?  Ours did seem happy once.

A NECKLACE			

Once, your life resembled a string of vibrant
pearls and beads of mother-of-pearl, whose swirling
iridescent pattern outshone your workdays.
	Nacre’s resilience

overwhelmed the filament that displayed them.
Knots prevented losing them all in one stroke,
yet they’re scattered over the ground, your lost joys
	flaunting their colors.

Can a broom or spectrograph help you find them?
What new clasp will keep them in place, preserve them?
Skillful hands are ready to lift each sand core,
	ready to hold more.

HOLIDAY GHOST 

After the feast I linger
to watch you pack your dishes
into one yawning machine,
leftovers into another.

Your family’s voices, faces,
gestures are gone for now.
It’s time to deal with me.

Your day’s olfactory trappings, 
your soul’s stand-in for hunger,
I stand in the steam, preserving
moments that made you squirm.

UNCERTAIN SKY		

I dream there’s a card in my pocket
whose face is a sky with clouds
that gather and clear,

then swing to one side and back
as if on a hinge until 
sky’s azure deepens.

The card’s shiny verso is plain,
intentionally blank, defying
all efforts to search

for stratus or cumulonimbus.
Their billowing, drifting selves
have abandoned me 

to the care of this dream gone lucid—
this lens so narrowly focused
I can’t look away.

____________________

PEDICURE

          for Heather

It’s an old story; wish I didn’t know
the ending. Let them file, massage, immerse.
Let glitter find its way onto each toe.

O warmish whirlpool, o enameled glow,
deliver me from cares! Suspend the curse
of an old story I don’t want to know.

Volcanic folly’s ash, now apropos
of nothing, darkens my clear universe
until glitter erupts onto each toe.

Unfounded wishes, errors that would grow
like ingrown claws—at last these can disperse,
become a story. Now I want to know

how polish may affect the status quo.
Is confidence something I can rehearse
now that the glitter’s gleaming on each toe?

Leaving the spa, I won’t retrace the flow
of psychic lava. Please keep comments terse.
It’s an old story. Those who know, will know
why glitter found its way onto each toe.

THE PICTURE NOT PUBLISHED

       On the day of the Charlie Hebdo attack,
         I gratefully remember a former editor

Some of us probably despised his caution—
excessive! — in forbidding us to run
the edgy portrait one of us commissioned.
What was he now, our nanny?

"We'd all be dead the day it hit the newsstands,"
he warned us in the conference room. "There’s no
portrayal of the Prophet they'll accept."
We left the meeting stunned

but went on publishing, winning awards.
Our readers never knew what they had missed.
We went on raising children, meeting grandkids,
writing another day

like Shakespeare after Hamlet, which had little
to do with Denmark.

VINEGAR JAR, 2020

How did I navigate those first few days
of mortal fear, extravagant excess
of seeming symptoms (fever! chills! malaise!)
and insufficient knowledge to address
such terrors? What if I should have to cough?
Would that send me careening toward the hour
of sirens, ventilators—ON, then OFF?
But then a friend recalled soup—hot and sour—
that quelled his coughing in a calmer year.
Why not this year? What matters, after all,
is breathing. I poured vinegar in a jar,
inhaled its sharp fumes, cast off COVID’s thrall.

Did this kill anything outside of fear?
Maybe. I’ll never know. For now, I’m here.

TO AN INSOMNIAC

Your loyal friend awaits you, misses you,
opens her arms despite a long estrangement.
She understands you better than you knew.
Only your side held back in this arrangement.

No need to hunt for her—only allow
your eyes to close, your bright scheme to unwind.
Her soft embrace will swallow up for now
the storm that brews and occupies your mind.

But if today’s tenacious thoughts won’t end,
won’t wrap themselves around the spool of night—
do you not understand Sleep is your friend?
The only plan she has is to rewrite
your script of tension and anxiety.
The rest of you is ready to agree.

____________________

FLYOVER ZONE
        for L.R.

Some say Louisiana Purchase best
describes Midwest.
Why not a stretch between the wide Missouri
and the smooth prairie
before it starts to bunch up into cliffs?
No whys or ifs,
only the geographic definition
of an omission—

no mention of the old ancestral grit
and laws rewarding it
with land, for some (not all) with fortitude.
My own ancestral brood
clung to the harbor, toiled so they could feast
in what you call Back East.
We hardly ever thought of pioneers
except in grade-school years,

while sitting in a movie matinee
on a dim Saturday
too hot or cold or rainy for the beach.
There, we would reach
for popcorn, see the cowboys' big blue sky
and watch their bullets fly.
And maybe we considered Hollywood
a next-door neighborhood.

BEACH MOSAIC

After they cracked beneath
my feet in wet brown-sugar sand,
I dropped them in the color pail:

white as my fresh new teeth,
tan as my summer face and hand,
smooth as a new-filed fingernail,

blue as my eyes or brown as our hair.
These were for Mommy’s mosaic.
I know now she thought hard

but also lightly about where
to place them so she'd make
the shape of every shard

cling to a lovely pattern not
too simple, or complex,
or obvious, but still

detectable. And what she taught
without a word or text
merged with the ocean’s thrill.

ENUMERATION
          R.I.P. Norton Juster, author of The Phantom Tollbooth

Norton Juster was right that the Senses
can be taken by numbers and tenses.
            But even a mystic
            can be a statistic
sometimes when the counting commences.

____________________

ON EDGE

Your stress will not remain within your pores.
It creeps across floors,
makes inhospitable the welcome mat
that will not remain flat,
stuck between sills with each hail and farewell
while balky knobs say Go to hell;
finally alerts the dog never to play
but reprimand the wide world Keep away.
 

TIGER RIDER

When you're no longer
riding the tiger,
where will you sleep?
     Boat on a river.
     Arms of a lover.
     Here at my desk.

As you jump off
the tiger's back,
what will you see?
     Only the new
     wonder of slowing
     body and breath.

Once you have crept
out of the brush,
what will you do?
     Watch his dread feet
     as he continues
     following prey.

Now that your beast
hunts on his own,
what will you eat?
     Bird, rabbit, fish,
     each has its chances
     to elude me.

Since he must prowl
here and abroad,
how will you live?
     Don't ask me that.
     He may be watching,
     listening still.
 

BARRIER REEF

“Some of the [New York] subway cars... are deep underwater now. The retired
cars have been used to create artificial reefs up and down the eastern seaboard.”
—Jen Carlson, The Gothamist, Oct. 23, 2015.

Before this was a quiet room for you
it clattered over borough boundaries
toward the museum. Inside, Mother taught me

to look at human faces and imagine
painting or drawing them. But I changed trains:
poetry, music, anything but pictures.

The subway rumbled on, malodorous
and dingy till, steam-cleaned and streamlined, this car
was dumped into Atlantic coastal waters.

There is no clatter now unless a boat
of scuba divers visits to record
silver or pink striped fins propelling you

through and around these unbarred doors and windows.
Seaweed enrobes passenger seats, poles, walls,
strap-hanger straps, floors, ceilings. Welcome, fish,

to urban decay. As you ride the current
darting about for food or spawning grounds,
your images flow through my eyes and mingle

with memories in a now-open mind.
There is no barrier left to stop your likeness
from swimming onto watercolor paper.

____________________

GRIEVANCE

___________________

THE WILLOW BOUGH

After these last few years of my neglect,
his work is lost — the young man who once scaled
this tree to prune it, telling me his father
would make him choose a willow switch whenever
he needed flogging.

Here is the hefty bough severed by wind,
left dangling till I figure out its center
of gravity. Imagining it as
shoulder, arm, wrist, palm, fingers, now I tug
outward on one rough finger till the bough
slips down the trunk.

Its carcass, larger, heavier than I am,
is flanked by dregs of autumn and last night’s
tentative snow. I gather the culled branches
toward a sheltered space, leave them to winter
close to their source.

They’ll be in no one’s way. What of the young man
and all the punishments he once selected?
Maybe he has a family now. Must they
choose switches too?

TRANSPOSITION

Some things you thought you’d never buy again
(since thrift and luck allowed them to abound)
are missing since the move: a fountain pen

and all its ballpoint friends. O denizen
of habit, you are at a loss! Unfound
are things you never thought to buy again.

Commerce has no allure for you. Siren
of clever charms, it calls with sight and sound:
“You miss that since the move? Why not this pen?

“Forget the old and buy the new!” But then
you check your list and fear you’re losing ground.
The things you vowed you’d never need again

include bowls, flatware, hammers. Oxygen?
You hyperventilate, darting around,
worrying, frowning for your missing pen.

Oh, never mind. Enjoy a madeleine
and make the new place old. Let it resound
with thoughts you’ll never lose, ever again.
Don’t miss the fountain when you move the pen.

HUNDREDS OF CORKS
 

Close to the end of June, here is the first
bottle of wine I've opened since the fight
on New Year's. Corks he had removed, dispersed,
still turn up in his wake, not watertight
but buoyant. Can I winnow out the true
from the synthetic, use them in my craft?
How to redeem this drunken residue—
discard? Repurpose? (Coasters, trivets, raft...)
Does rearranging substance justify it?
It's peaceful now, no chattering TV.
Can there be such a thing as too much quiet?
At least no one's misunderstanding me.
Unwittingly he reinforced the vessel
I've learned to steer, the hull in which I nestle.

SELFIE FOR A TRAVELER

The sun draws a horizon on earth’s brow.
I hold a camera overhead to make
my eyes more present; the chin I allow
a partial absence for aesthetic’s sake.

There will arrive a time when no known face
is recognizable. Now evanescent
shadows approach the west, soon to outpace
your longitude. It is for you, this present.

RINSE CYCLE

          Discovering the brain’s nightly “rinse cycle”
                NIH Director's Blog 3/5/2020

On waking, there are hints
we sit front row
to a horror show.
In sleep, the brain’s on Rinse
to marinate and mince
the overflow
of toxic woe
that leaves its dirty prints.

Not brainwashed, though,
I’m laying low
to dodge the psyche’s glints.
Even as slow
misgivings grow,
I leave my brain on Rinse.

___________________

THINGS THAT GO WRONG

I stood nearly an hour while the welder
sliced the battered front end off my mailbox,
then the perfect backside off a new one,
brazed them together in a gold-toned line,
doors on both ends so I'd be safe from traffic.

Glancing at the number stickers, he named
my home's original owners, who had built it
just after World War II. Yes, he had known them.
The husband was town postmaster; the wife
used to give haircuts right there in my basement.

The welder spoke of things that can and do
go wrong—in hospitals, on backroads, elsewhere:
A local doctor, who had flipped his sport car
on a hairpin turn, was found sorting through
stuff that had flown out of his glove compartment.

The same doctor's one hypodermic needle,
which grew duller each year of his long practice,
is now on display in the town museum.
The welder then remarked (did not complain)
how few young people can imagine driving

without GPS or living without debt.
How even our language may soon be lost.
How his mother, with Alzheimer's, inquired
last week about the health of that old doctor,
who finally had died decades ago.

How his own family has lived and worked here
for generations with no telephone.
How flame-retardant treatments can dissolve
a washing machine's agitator, which
explains the burn-marks on his overalls.

 

YOUR FIRST SHOES
              for Leonore

You'll find them (I'm not telling where they're stashed).
And when you do, you'll know that what seemed silly
a generation back, fit to be trashed,
was quintessential to your grandma's frilly,
close-stitched, pink-patent-leather style of love.
I know when you discover them, unlace
soft uppers, flex the soles, you will think of
her hands pulling them on you, her bright face.
Now that you, too, have seen how children grow,
how fast they run, and some of what they step in,
you've seen how difficult it is to know
who starts a fight, how pride works as a weapon.
Go find your shoes. Try not to pull the thread
connecting heel to instep, toe to tread.

SAPPHICS FOR A CROW

Caw! C-caw! you shout from above the chimney,
warning, scolding, flaunting your height, haranguing.
What could be so serious and for so long,
crow on the chimney?

Cheep! Ch-cheep! he cries by the basement window,
first attempt at using his wings like Mother's
failed. He's angry, hungry and scared, defeated,
chick by the window.

Caw! you now interrogate me from on high:
Why this stupid house where there once were arbors?
Why that trench, the window-well trap I can't reach?
Crow on the rooftop,

here I go to offer your chick a tree branch.
Will he climb it? Oh, but he trembles, backs up,
turns around and presses his beak securely
into a corner.

I withdraw and hope he'll escape in secret.
Out in front, three lavender plants have withered.
Prying up their brittle gray roots, I toss them
into a corner.

Next day there's no cawing, no wind, no cheeping.
Lost? Survived? I may never know, but someone's
found the lifeless lavender stubs and placed them
back in their garden.

Mother crow, you've left me a gift! But what for?
Caw! C-caw! A mockery? Grieving? Thank-you?
Thanks for what? For trying? Succeeding? Failing?
Seeing things your way?

____________________

A CONVERSATION
       R.I.P. Fred Feirstein

THE PAT-DOWN RAP

THE BACK STAIRS

                             for RM

Let me not forget the evenings
when we wandered from your kitchen
to a stairwell, mostly vertical,
a challenge after wine
though easy in the morning.

At the top, you’d fetch a poem
from the cozy servant's room
you'd made your favorite station
for dozing, reading, writing,
examining the world.

I can see its stark interior,
the bookshelves you had crafted
to fit each odd-sized corner,
the view from hooded windows
invisible to neighbors.

In the end, you climbed the steps
of your wood-spindled orbit
in dim light, long exposure,
deep field, small aperture,
memory's narrow portal.

ON LETTING HER GET AWAY WITH IT

Your mother learned to keep men in their place,
to slap one who's impetuous or rude,
especially if she wasn't in the mood.
Then why not slap a daughter? Leave no trace,
no broken bones, no scarring on your face,
certainly no internal injury.
What better way is there to make you see
she's still the boss and you've fallen from grace?

Today is different. You have had enough
and vow to let her know this slap's her last.
She's not the only one who can play rough.
But your strength scares you, and you draw back fast.

Not for her sake, but yours, your snap decision:
You just don't want to spend your life in prison.

THE NEIGHBOR

He lived across the street,
was ninety-two years old.
I never knew his name
or spoke a word to him.
They empty out his cottage,
leave boxes at the curb,
drive off with what they value.

In the driveway his white truck,
For Sale sign in the windshield,
will linger for a while,
soon to be gone, his avatar.
We waved and exchanged smiles
back when he still could hobble.
One morning as I watched

an ambulance arrived.

They entered as I watched.
He was too weak to hobble
or wave or exchange smiles.
He leaves an avatar
that lingers for a while,
For Sale sign on its windshield.
Relatives load their trucks,

drive off with what they value,
leave boxes at the curb.
They've emptied out his cottage.
I spoke no word to him
nor even knew his name.
At ninety-two years old,
he lived across the street.

_____________________________________________________

REBUKE OF THE DASHBOARD SPARROW*

I can't believe you've asked me what to do
as if you thought I understood earth's clutter.
You both are human; you can think it through.

Jarred by the swift intrusion, noisy flutter
of wings on my arrival, you go numb,
searching for signs and omens while I shudder

and flee the other portal. You succumb
to spring's confusion: roll the windows up,
turn on the air, the news radio's hum--

easier to ignore. An envelope
of many questions, fewer answers, holds
your shaken forms intact. Tentative hope

for clarity and peace of mind unrolls
to cloak you, amateurish as wax wings.
One of you, blushing, stares at the controls

with no clue where to drive. My partner sings
to me; I spot him, bid farewell to you.
I can't believe you've asked me all those things.

        *First published in Trinacria

ON A COMPUTER FILE DELETED BY ACCIDENT *

You thoughts that never were infused with ink,
never embodied, never quite committed
to this world but allowed to shift and blink
in electronic ether, where you flitted
between “I will,” “I may,” and “I will not,”
depending on the weather and the news—
you had already died, started to rot
and disappear, by opting not to choose.
But it was she who never placed to paper
your ghostly images, who was to blame.
Existing on your own you might escape her
even if firmly wedded to her name.
With you in print, earthbound and on display,
how would her life be different today?

                    *First published in Trinacria

A Rembrandt Self-Portrait *

The presence of paint to denote a void
or turn it into an abyss, despite
an odd-angled caress of orange light,
was a backdrop on which his spirit toyed
with drama: four-dimensional, decoyed
eloquently in two. It is midnight.
The artist plays Apostle Paul, whose sight
illuminates the scene he has deployed.
His palette poses as a scripture, bound
at his left, less imposing than the orbs
through which he scrutinizes our attention.
Light from his forehead radiates around
its furrows down to where his name absorbs
a value poised to outlive time’s suspension.

                            *First published in Trinacria

Landlocked*

In time and with regret

water deserts the brain.

You learn how to forget

with grace, to ignore pain,

to let each moment pass.

Here in this landlocked place

time alone flows. The glass

does not contain your face.

To a Stinkbug*

The basil plants grow thinner now

where once a green and white

fragrant lace curtain filtered out

stray looks and excess light.

They barely live, no thanks to you

and your dead-leaf disguise,

your vagrant gait along the stalk,

your pseudo-bloodshot eyes.

A rusting, rotting Sherman tank

is what you most evoke,

although your ammunition brings

no fiery blast, no smoke.

Your breed's passive-aggressive stance

took eons to perfect.

(But I'm not sure what maimed these plants:

your need, or my neglect.)

A BABY BOOMER REPORTS BACK*

Dear Parents: Yes, kids were a good idea.

Your optimism wasn't a mistake.

You were the best, and yes, I'm taking care

of what you gave me -- mostly while awake,

but sleeping, too. I rummage for pain's cause

rather than popping pills. I avoid trouble,

recycle, eat right, protest crazy wars

both hot and cold. (We still could turn to rubble.)

What else? Oh yes, that business about talent--

you said it was a gift from (fill the blank)

and must be used for good. This is a constant

challenge. They wouldn't take it at the bank.

                                  * These originally appeared in Trinacria  -- by author's permission

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