It’s in the shading.
It’s the way the light is written.
It’s the way the observer takes it all in.
It’s the way it convinces one that the world will last.
It’s the way it plants a seed in the mind,
the way it touches one inside, lives inside
the streets of memory, inhabits one’s emotional house,
sunsets, harbors, all the great perfect things
that exists in the brief eternity that loop eternally,
that convinces one that the extraordinary
is the purpose of existing in ordinary time,
that every moment lives for the perfect still life.

" There are only four questions of value in life, Don Octavio.
What is sacred?
Of what is the spirit made?
What is worth living for,
and what is worth dying for?

The answer to each is the same:
only love."

From don Juan de Marco



Where are you now when songs
get blown and dance in the turf
of memory?  I find the ends of
everyday strings tie the knots
knitted from songs I've heard
and poems I've written.

Four questions are unanswered
Don Octavio.  I travel over years
undone or never to be.  My mind
unknits the warm nights, the chirp
of insects, the swarm so thick
we could not make love in the
dark, by the lake.

No answers swim into my mind.
No questions fall to the ground.
My gown remains laced.  You
touched me under the ties but
you left me in the rain, unanswered,
unable to return to the capsule
out of which time begat those
four questions.  

Look for the answers under the
salt of my tears and find only
smears.  My tears are no reply.




Caroline Shank

Why, when I need sanity most,
do I find confusion
surfacing around me.

Tell me you love or tell me you
don't.  Speak plainly, without rancor
or condescension.  For
Heaven's sake quit
confounding me with erudition.

You know enough
the way to get in
touch with the skin
of meaning.  

Rub me on my fingertips.
Feel my heartbeats.
I feel you in the cradle of my
old age.

Lead me not into temptation.
But deliver me from confusion.
forever and ever.

Amen

Caroline Shank

Run with me Sammy
Hold onto the trails of
imagination. I love 
your touch.
You pour through
the branches of my life
like sunbeams through
cognac.

Caroline Shank

Sunshine on bare ground.  Acorns
fall off live oaks.  The shade
creeps where last year flowers
grew.  The planet is off its axis
and I am alone.

No language leaves splats where
before the sunlight shone in a
poem of great beauty.
Tears now nurture time's
becoming.

Trust the only thing that has been
ever true.  Goodbye has many
leaves.   It yields stones among
the twigs, fruit that is puny
and wee.


Caroline Shank

It's all behind me now.  The
days of wine and roses, and you.
I was young in the tender
of my years.  

You were curled and red, the
tight nights of summer dimmed
my eyes.  The breezes
of June were wrapped embraces.

In these, my last years here, I dwell
on summer.  No matter the cold of
Wisconsin, it's the brilliance of
then that I rub on my face like
fine oil.  I remember the incense.
The musk of your scent
lingers.

We were a tune that played for
the span of one summer.  It
is as strong in my memory as ever
were your hands on my face.  

Once when I loved you,
almost fifty summers ago, I
promised I wouldn't hurt you.
But you left me to
broken poems.

I am wooden in my age
and I dance with hard
shoes.  The days are
long and the nights
no longer sing.

Caroline Shank

Don't lead me down that path.
That trodden split concrete lump
of sameness you called your
love.  I've tripped before on
that sidewalk of belief.  

Don't place my hand over your
sorry song.  The beat is slack,
the rhythm is tired. I have heard
more poems in Heaven and Earth
than are imagined in
your philosophy Horatio.

Walk off the curb where no
fence is.  There you will
find your blind way.  Don't
grasp for daisies

when you find the end of the
journey.  You will trip
on the  lines I draw
with chalk made of
tears and dust.

Caroline Shank