So long ago.    
I was always older than you.
You were stronger than I.
It was Summer, you rolled
joints in the kitchen.  I
waited in the other room.

Other rooms, other tales.
I remember the night
we walked to the tavern.
I wrote poems while you
played pool.  I wore red,
you touched my
hand.  I didn't know you,
stranded on the brink of
midnight, waiting for me
to end the song.  

You left me in the rain,
toeing the brush of your
dense backyard.  I called,
my voice thrown in the
rain, the wind's song
tortured with the sound
of tears.

This Thanksgiving.
I will drink alone,
long ago yesterdays,
linger to
tomorrow.

Caroline Shank

I cried when Rozy died.  Great
clutches of gulps.  The next two
deaths left me undone.  No tears
left in my account.  We are all
but flashes of light by Buddha.
We are bubbles in a summer
sky.

I have used up my allotment
of sorrows and the emptiness
of my soul is deep and quiet.
Hear fellow wanderers you are
not alone.

Among the stands of people
whose silence is felt to be
flannel resolution I am to tell
you to wait for sorrows too
incredible to be bourne.
You are in the company of
dryness, of desolation.

God will send you to your
knees in the Great Relief
of terrible sorrow.  Then
you will begin again.  You
will be safe, inevitably, in
the silence and quiet
contemplation that those of
us who have passed dispair
find in every day things.  

Then death Will Have No
Dominion and tears WILL
flow and water your fertile
communion.

And I? I sit alone
and quietly
reflect.  


Caroline Shank

Haiku.    Snow

Winter comes early
The leaves are not yet raked in
The snow covers all.

Not everyone believes in Angels
but I do.  Sweet singing below
hearing, at the heart of feeling.
Angels are wide white lace
that enfold me in my deepest
sorrow and my highest joy.  

I trust the whirl and whoosh
of them. I catch sight of them
on the side of my eye when
I am not even looking

Angels announced the coming
of Jesus and His going.
They whispered to me the day
my children were born.

I see Angels in the look of loved
ones.  They flutter above my
every day and lay me down
to sleep at night.

I see Angels in the corridor.
sweetly singing homecoming
to patients and embracing
Angels sylphing through me
as I work.

And in our sorrow Angels hold
our faces where tears fall.  Angels
kiss our souls with love and gently
bring us home.

Caroline Shank

Christmas is not going to perform
for me again this year.  Not going to send me to the five and dime for
shreds of tinfoil or hooks of candy.

Song sung blue over the white
and drifting snow.  I remain
dans la grotte.  Why?  You might
ask.  Tomorrow the Wise Men
start their slouch
toward Bethlehem,
unencumbered by gifts.

Joy is not running through
me.  Starlite, star bright,
I wish you would come
home tonight.

Far away you send sorrow.
I package it in used boxes.
I will sit for twelve days and
twelve nights.  Alone.

I will *******
another Christmas and
count to forty.  It's what
I do.  I am blistered with
the wait.  

When you come home I
will handstand myself
with joy.  It's been the
journey of my life to wait
for you. My face to the
Star, again.

Next Christmas I will celebrate
you.  Home from afar,
I will wrap myself in your
name.  You will open me.  

Please.

Caroline Shank

It's a rainy day in the usual
cool of Wisconsin in the
dark months.  
There are  hundreds of shades of
gray and dun.

I am wide awake and missing
the sunlight of better times
when my soul prospered.
The sweet taste of warm on my
face.  You on my mind and
long walks.  I have grayed out
the summer
days when
you were the only thing on
my landscape.

Winter has turned all my
thoughts to long shadows
of memory.  You were never
gray or dun colored.  You
are inside me in colors of
radical brilliance.

Tomorrow I will assign the
sorrow.  Today the fragility
of missing you is like fine
single panes of memory I
cannot shatter.

On most days you lay
quietly in the soft room
of yesterday.
Today you are restless.
I shake myself awake but
the dream insists.

I'm old to myself while you
remain young in the roundness
of a single summer.  The fabric
of warm on my nascent love
has pins and sticks me.

Don't walk in.  I am
not available.  My hair is no
longer the color of amber,
My tan limbs are startling
In their denial of tan.

I think of you throughout
poetry. The long lines
of unmetered days return
but I get on.

Mistake me not for ignorance.
The vocabulary of my life
begins and ends in
four
short
months.

Caroline Shank

I don't think you know about
the stain above the line of my
sight.  The colors that keep changing with each breathing,
the syllables that won't stay still.

There is a blot on my brain
that smears thoughts into a
puddle.  Did you ever see
yellow reach out like a
tentacle?  It grabs whatever
it can find.  Red is next, a
little less demanding but
still impenetrable.  

It's the blue that can ****.
Uncontained it flows over
my mind like a silent wave.

I can't show you because
I don't know the magic
phrase that makes the
inkblot go away.

Is it in the rainbow when God
said we are alone now?  I
flay in the flow of the thought
that we got on the boat in
the first place.

You cannot see what I hide,
from even myself.  You may
hold me, and if you can, find
the color of safety.

Caroline Shank