My Daughter Finding Fossils
    Lake Michigan
    (Nine years old)



Early morning beached bones
and million-year-old rocks
whisper, “Little girl?”.
She stops.  The socks she
carries rattle full of rocks.
She hears the one she wants.

She calls, “Mommy, look!”.
She thinks the fossil has smiles
I can see.  Ah, I haven’t seen
fossil smiles since I was nine
and curly and cradling my own
socky bundle by the beach
of little mouths calling to
little girls of fossil dreams,
fossil futures, and stone-hard
fossil love.

Caroline Shank

I write this poem as memory.
The warm night we danced
over the pizza place to "Me and
Mrs. Jones." or the trip to the
museum.  

We were tan and
dressed in white.  Summer
was knocking and we
opened the door.

It was a fine door.  We didn't
know then that the wind from
Canada was coming for us.
We drank as we shared
your jacket.

"Listen" you warned me you
were leaving, calling me to wrap
your fleeing shadow around
the mannequin of July.  "Listen"
pounding in my head.

I write you into poetry 46 years
later.  See, I hold your flame in
my hands. Drops of ash in
a goblet of memory.


Caroline Shank

At what point do I cross over
to the unknown spaces?
Fires carve.  Smoke
marks the places of memory.

"Beyond this point there be
dragons."  

I run to the flat humid
edge of the world.
Under my feet is lava.  
"Is this a dream? "
I ask the lone
sparrow.

"Hurry" he said "Run
before
the wind loosens your
madness."

There is no room to
sit in this desolate
geography.  I am bound
to the edge with laces.

Call the naked lion.
Retrieve for me
the last vestige of sanity.
The remnants of sensation.

I remain alone on the
precipice of thought.
Find me, if you can,
amid the char and
debris of your last

goodbye.  


Caroline Shank

I wait for the cold dark to run
like *** down my chin.

I wait for the sun to round
the side of my building
bringing tomorrow's promise.

It was always to be tomorrow
when I taste your licorice flavored
mouth again.

I wait like the Oracle said,
for the time when the gods
will bring you to my song.

I wait. Coltrane blowing
forever in my heart.  

Forever, the saxophone,
your breath,
in my hair.

I wait for tomorrow. For music.
For wine.  A song to
sing to the empty nights.
I drink to the miles into
darkness…



Caroline Shank

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