My life, then, hung like a
sun-yellow mobile that spun
in the heat as I flowed from
one end of summer to the other.
The songs on the radio were
my island.  My life as a girl
in the years before fences
appears in memory slides,
dressed in the beaches of  
youth.

I grew from seeds to roses in
the ground of my childhood
summers.  In the calendar of
my life as a young girl
every date prefigured you.
Day by day, in the years of
growing I bought, with the
barter of my soul, all the
heat and all the music.

Battened by the times before
you, strengthened by long
storms, hot suns, cold winds,
this, then is what I offer
you:  deep beaches, thornworn
roses, summers that flow
from one end of your life
to the other.

Caroline Shank

You write of
another love.  
You care not for the
tear of pain on a
bruised heart.

The past
cracks like shell. Poems
fall to the ground. There are
memories underneath my back.

Say nothing. Go to
the end of the day in your
safe place.

I release your voice.  I sing
to myself where you once sang,
unafraid.

Take me not to your happiness.
I drop down a rope
of words.
I will swing myself above  
memory.

Caroline Shank

.
Candles light the way to my worn
torn books.  I read every night.  The
covers loosened from the binding.

It is a fragile thing that I have come
here to write you.  I am a little out of
shape.  The company of great
writers intimidate me. I am wrapped around the stylus of an idea.  

In some way think of this as an
entry into my thoughts.  Are you
interested in the nocturnal rambling
of my old, my favorite phrases?

Something in me likes to hear you,
in your deep voice, read to me what
I write.  My imagination startles me.

The candles are burnt enough.  
You will not return to this library
which you began so long ago.

I write to you in my diary,
Harker, words you fling from the
runaway carriage window.

I will never die and I will look
for you in my books forever.

I listen to the wind through
the pages.

Caroline Shank

Time eclipsed.
The hours
dose the day.
I am ungood at social
graces.

For what are we to do?
Knowing this?

Apologies skip stones
across thought. I drown
in regret. I am older
not better.

I chase all the live-long
day, calm the tired
minutes
Frown the ridiculous
heart.

But,

I bloom for you.

Caroline Shank

There is  something in the
air that moves me forward
always off balance, as a
thought glances by me and
is quickly forgotten.  

There is a law someone
never told me.
When I was younger I lived
unbothered by the whims
and movements of change.  
Now I cling, precariously,
to a life untethered.

I see my lorn form
change in the whisp
of a moment.

Regardez moi,
je pleure



Caroline Shank

You left her
on the pale of an old wound. Just When She Needed You Most. It's
true that the world is a flat rockfilled
place.

For years she worked a new garden.
Now the songs
are warped and the plants
won't grow.

Her ramblings stutter.
But  offer
a small breath in her direction
and she dances.

Combien Monsieur for some air
you breathed, for a flower you
grew, flesh to the perfect
old dream?


Caroline Shank

I have rebuilt so many times. Every
love is a dispair.  I have room for
none but the lonely, the broken
pedestrians of time's sidewalks.

How old I am is irrelevant.  I
am tuned to the rhyming night.
I listen to the frogs mating in the
swamp, the crickets and, in
season, the cicadas who do not
love but for a breath.  

My house is now a ramshackle
of old memories, songs that
burn my fragile skin, and the
sloe gin of my youth.

You retain me, and in the end,
the currency of my life
is writ of you.

I have rebuilt so many times,
love's fires ring the sidewalk
around my memory .
I write of the past that
is in runes.  My thoughts enact
in me that youth that was always
yours to have and to hold.

We are all phantoms of our pasts.
We are rubbed with it. For you
my skin sings of the tight tan
you knew

once upon a time.

Caroline Shank