The birds sit, goofy and slake.
Feathers drift, sift, settle on
chairs like soft shells shaped
by whisps of room air.

There is no thought, no plan.
Two white birds in two cages for
safety. The trill of calls penetrates
the living room air as if waiting
for the cue to caw to begin.

I hear you release the still
blue note, the crying color  
of the muezzin to my sleep.

The birds raison d'etre is your
morning blue creamy face.
My arms stretch to you.

Our blue
skies dawn and
the song

begins.

Again.


Caroline Shank
07/25/22

I write in runes.  I mean to
leap the alphabet.  The orbital
spin of time and me dizzy and all. .

I will write you tomorrow,
shake the mica off my
thoughts.  You will not
walk with me among the
glacial shores of thinking.

I will return a fossil of
millions of years,
along the edges
of meaning.  I am not
unfamiliar with your pace
along the beach where i
lie so still.  It's why I will
write tomorrow when my
heart has ******

in the sun.  

I don't see you
coming anymore to the sandhills of
Poems.  It was always
difficult to reach you through
the tangle of my sclerotic

heart.

Tomorrow I will be a fragment of
loving you.  I will hold the
thought until it fossil
freezes and I will lie on the
Beach of Remembering,
washed by eons of

poetry.  I will write you
but all you will hear are the

echoes
of forgetting.


Caroline Shank

I collect Things

I collect things.
Dreams in a jar, old
soap in the sunlight.

Leftover buttons from
plaid shirts i
used to wear when
I was young.

Fingers now riddled
with arthritis comb
thru junk
drawers.

Pictures of my children.
Babies are always good
before school lures them
to the trenches.  I collect
paintings from preschool
and gifts from museum
shops. Little owls from

when I collected owls.

I collected chickens.
I tried to make it up to
you, your mother's cabbage
and chicken dinner.

I collect the visits to
Door County.  The
shops we entered,
the breakfast we
drove 4 hours to
accomplish.

You wore your last smile
like a yellow slash.  I
collected the sound
you made, the whisper of
dying. The last soft
skin call cry.

I collect the days you
never left me.  The rolled
up newspapers of
the years
you never read.

I collect the lost years
we, to each other,
in rolled up brown
suede corners.


Caroline Shank

The phone rings
Saturday is bath night
Monday laundry.

No Amish here
said Peter.

Sleep is a distant
Relative

You are a mask
.
I told you.

You aré
my attachment
to things

Christmas and

This tea ceremony

Blesses our union.

And our children.

We escaped
The introduction
Made love and

drank a toast.
The bitten
Sandwich

grew into

a love poem
evanescent as

Foam

Filling as
marrow
Fills the
bone.


Caroline Shank
7.14.22






.

Philos:

The question of

existence has
recently fallen into
the house of

insignificance.

You have no tiles to hang,
no metaphysics to
conjugate.  I am substance.

Actuality.  The froth of
conversation opened
into the accident
of birth.

Remind me. of last
night.  The
bedsheets are stretched.
The conversation of
sheep, grazed on
the syllabed

Of significance.

We love in the green
Over lament of
Civility.

You are the brand.
I am the name
that shail

never be

Spoken

Caroline Shank

I'm tired of love
poems
The laundry of
attraction.
I weary of
sadness reiterated
Everywhere.

The wombs of
Creation
Are omnipresent.
I read your sojouron
into the skin side
of this
Madness.

No I don't know what
you mean.  The
Rhetoric of the
young, of the aged,
that moan of the years
that stretch, the direction
Empty
of arms to hold you,
of Kisses too
silent,
of hearts that beat
Alone.

Send me to the banks
of literature.  The Ganges
where dust quaffs and
Fire burns and there is
only the poetry of tears
for the

Unforgiven.

Caroline Shank
7.12.2022

Noon
Turns
and night
Is the
Bridge.

You step. Forward.

I cannot sommelier
The moment
Of drunken sorrow.

We made love under
Lies and the trumpets
Were off key.

The question never
asked was when
did you know?

The tattered fragile
rain of love runs
out the window.

Where was i when
time leaked out?

A cold sidewalk.
A faded flower.

The remains of love
is an urn.  
Smashsd sideways.
Rolls away toward the
Avenue A terminal.

The sounds under the
Bus were all the
Music  we ever

Sang.


Caroline Shank
7. 11. 2022