Hey Alabama. I drove through
you half my life ago. You were
most green and gracious. Blue
skies foamed clouds supine on
my skin. A thin veil of fog an
unseen future away.

I slowly crossed your planet,
picked flowers on the verge.
I remember the heat. The red
hair of summer curled against
the day. Nights vibrated, a gong
gone mild. Soft, resonating, still
resonating. I breathed air in
like smoke, holding it inside
for long seconds, a question
waiting for its answer.

Long years have veined miles,
mapped time. I am blued with
thinking of it.

Hey Alabama.
I remember. Your highways
still, so sweet. You travel
soft as sleep.


June 11, 2000 rc

I sit here.  

The winds
of late summer
sweep the curls of
dust over the
linoleum floor.

I think about
what it is to be declined,
to be culled out
as a small fish
is thrown back to the boy.

It was a rush
we exceld in
those years when

all I ever wanted was you,
and the music on the juke box in
the corner booth.  You wore
red plaid, but
it was your eyes that
portalled always,
the galleries we
explored frequently before
love.

I smoke a cigarette
or something,

inhale the evening.
think of the
Excavations:

The Creases of Conversation
that reflect in madness.
The Manuscripts of memory
scribed in
the night.

I lean into Friday.



Caroline Shank
8.25.2022

I remember you,  the midnight
phone calls you wanted me to
listen to, your day,  your work,
your other life.

The time, like clinking money, falls
into the jar on the mahogany
telephone table.   The same dark
wood grain on which I trace the
date of our first date,  kiss, the
only memory to last unchanged

by time,  by events,  by the wine.

The bottom of the glass where the
cheap red box's liquid left the drain
of midnight conversations is  now
this soggy epistolary testament.  

Don't tell me that you toast to a
frail collapsed container such
as is love unknown to the daylight,
the sidewalks of experience.

You only knew in me a triffle,
a while, of white pages.  
I knew you in the
dark sonnets of poetry.

Then you closed your sentence with
a masculine ending like
a gun shot across the page.  

Caroline Shank

The soliloquies
born of tears,
spoke of Loneliness.
The Plays the Thing.
The Long and Winding Road.  

Hamlet was not crazy,
as some think,

he was alone.

Lady Macbeth scraped blood
from her hands in a
castle of lonely rooms.

McCullers loneliness
was a companion.  

Teasdale wrote of the sea's
lonely foam.

Lear,  alone,  held Cordelia
to the
cold and empty sky.

I know Alone.   It is a wind
just past my skin.   Your hand
on my face is a reflection.   My
skin is uninterrupted by the
conversation of your fingers.

Alone is the road
we travel.  

Evermore.


Caroline Shank
8.16.2022

Summer Night

It's a quarter after six, on an August
evening of my 76th year.   I drink
a sherry.   Here,  my feet
are free of the socks I insist on
wearing,  I am smoking.

The entertainment
for tonight is planning tomorrow.

Tomorrow is the last mention of
Summer.

You took me into custody, left
my life's belongings behind.
Sans identification,  sans valuables,
sans feeling.

Now there is only the zeitgeist of
this age.   The long lobes of wise men
and the sagging ******* of yesterday.
I write in cursive so you will have
to talk to me.  

I am the last syllable of my family.
The seventies remain as a bastion
of understanding.  Do not blame

me for remembering you.

I have forgotten many things but not the warm Summer night.   It creeps over me like your

hand.


Caroline Shank
8.15.2022

It's getting dark early again. The
street lamps are on by dinner.
Soon the memory of piles of
leaves, the smell of Fall and
the call to jump in the whispering

auburn heaps of my youth
would jolt me.

I am old now and fat.  The
ritual of Autumn's call to
the dark evenings that were
an invitation to the holidays,
is a calling cocktail.

The rains drained the ashes
into the sidewalk gutters.  The
hopscotch grid fades as day
light melts and I lose the
game.

Games are like drifts of scents
across the light post's shadow.
They are the ephemeral
recipes of my New York
youth. I walk to the edges
of the grass reading the
folded paper fortunes that

told me I would marry Jack
someday. I didn't. I threw
the lined prediction in the
leaves, scuffed my brown
shoes on the sidewalk

never dreaming that real
life would crinkle like the
ruled paper forgeries.



Caroline Shank

Next Spring I will move.  The Wisconsin
winds will sweep me from this house
of yours where I no longer belong.

You climbed the lattice of the cold
Winter.  I was your bounty.  Now
I can leave the brown sugar color
of this apartment. There are scrapes
on white walls from your wheelchair.

The family will not care and for that,
I will not ask.  

I am through writing thank you notes
and receiving the few callers who
patted me for your loss.

Spring is too far away for intimate
details.  The shaking tree limbs
will be quiet and the annual
equinox will welcome new growth
and knitted sorrows.

We were an uninvolved lot,
the children and you and I.  

So I will write again
on my calendar.  No one will ever
remember that it was I who took
your hand,

your heart,

your suffering

to the last
quiet sigh.



Caroline Shank