I'm in a room without recovery area:
a room of intermission, a room
of collapse. Where are
the convenient little windows
to release a wicked bird of thought?
The quiet there is monk-like,
rogue, and slightly unpleasant, guilty
of moments spent with shadow.

I want to build a clock
that ticks once a year
—more dark than shark,

my confessional capacity
—time-stretched,
like the heavy intoxicated *******
of the witching hour. And I'll
make soup from the leftover prayers
of the day before, all in hopes
the rooms of me, then so clear,
will one day be faraway suns
in the temple of heaven.

Time Chimes

I call to you
from out the mullioned
window on the back
of my house.

Windows open to recent rains.  I feel the
soft air of yesterday before the crepuscular
failure of today. (I know, you hate that word,
crepuscular. You hate a lot of words.)

The last light of day lay like velvet
on my doorstep. A signal
to shake the lace curtains.
Wave to far years gone to
other lovers.  The vibrations
on my skin reminds me of you.  I am
old now.  These are memories of
when we were young and tan
and satisfied with a bed and a beer
and a joint shared in the upstairs room.
Now curtains slow as my breathing
slows.  I am comfortable in my
old chair here by the light.  The
mewling of feral kittens is music
enough.  

Night surrounds me.
The ocean is my song.
I am completed in my time.
You, my muse, are aware of
my souls quiet caring. The
sun sets where once we saw the
sky with blue eyes and shooting
stars.  Our destiny is a psalm
to missed timing and unlit
cigarettes.  

Hear me in your deafness
calling on the memories we
made like Michaelangelo.

Art is never a vehicle for
humans last only a
minute.

Time chimes in the
downstairs room
and I sing to myself.

Caroline Shank
2.1.22

You have walked into the destruction
of your mind and found a place there.
The detritus of a life lived in the face
of cancer, storms, and death abandoned
of the private letting go of acceptance.

You screened a life worth living
and found it wanting of love and
poetry.

Someday we will meet and
our faces, full of knowledge,
will know the relief of a rest
realized. The
nourishment of a kindred
moment of unmitigated
silence.

I will be your welcome.  I will
solve the enigma of two
lives waiting for a single
explosion.

We run now,
members  of the
cloister of our lives


forever.


Caroline Shank
2.1.22

You placed a flower in my
hand. We looked at each
other in the haze.
I gave you a long poem written
with the heat of our breaths
last bloomings.

It was in the days of our beach
that we walked through to
the last door. Time
burned where the ink
of my song, snug in the
bend, sang its last
goodbye.

"Time was, red was the color
of afternoons pressed
against us. " I wrote that to you,  
a tribute to love and to laughs,
and to syllables.

I am 75 now and read with
the cat on my lap.  She
knows the art of songs
sung in the wind,
with every sigh of her lovely
brindle colored breast.

Tomorrow she will bring
me no nearer to you
who sang, once, to me
in the

russet sand.


Caroline Shank
1.29.2022

My husband is ill and watches me
as I talk.  I clean him up and pretend
tomorrow there will be music.
We married in the
rain for luck.

Beware the white shoes that
pinch, the veils of tomorrow's
promises lie.
Shake the hair from
Sunday.

The children
are built from
undercover conversation.

We go along without a song.

We talk without a kiss.

In the still of the night
memories splurge.  The
flat back of the sax

plays out of tune.




Caroline Shank

I don't have for you, a leaf or
a stone or an unfound door,
no not even
the sound of the gate's
clicking.

Angel of my once beginning
broken,
home, blown down
around my wrinkled feet.

You are not allowed.
The abandonment of a love
affair under your careful
vocabulary, can only but strip
the remaining skin shined
mind.

Where else should I go to,
gently or torn away?  To
dream of better days? To
round the corner empty
after all.

The same birds in blue plumage
sing a little tilted now.  Though the
pattern is the same.

You don't see the war between
myself and you. You see
patterns where I walk in the
garden.  I see the soft brown
of yesterday curl adoringly
once around the house
and fall asleep.

I am out placed. The Angel
in the square told of my
forsaken, washed and combed
recumbent  wisdom turn
to ashes on the winter
Manhattan sidewalk.
.
Will I see you in
September?



Caroline Shank
1.25.22

prowles through my geography.
He is imperious in his flat paws
and dark, voluminous gaze.

His prowl, never the same, twice
around me. Learning the veins
and arteries of memory.  He
walks the rope of yesterday.

Black and sleek, he sways,
the tension oblique in it's
slant towards the cage bars.

I hear his rumbling response .  
He shaves the vowels of his
experience.  Glares like

tomorrow the world will end
With the slap of his jaw.
fhe end of the bars

never meant anything.  He
lumbers into my waiting gaze.

I feel the cold cold stare
of night falling on me.
He smiles in satisfaction,
paces again through my
tears.



Caroline Shank
January 14, 2022