To perhaps
remember?

Life lived before.
The leaf circling the
sky. The breeze on
skin.  I know it.

Or I feel it.  The wind
like kisses.
These things

just beyond thought
glisten like oil on the
synapses of experience.

Glimpsed on one
side of consciousness.
Saudade. To be
in the
dream.

To feel nostalgia.
To wonder if

it all might have been

different?



Caroline Shank

Summer

The stream trickled on,
the frog jumped in to cool off,
the branch creaked with loss

Autumn

autumn golds the leaves,
the cool breeze stirs the summer's
winding song to winter

Winter

Wind wraps around me,
I breathe in the winter air,
the cold ice crack snaps

Spring

Clouds form.  Cold North winds
toll in.  We run toward Spring,
slide.  You warm in me.



Caroline Shank

Sunlover


I lay out there nearly naked.
You are warmth and touch and
kiss.  My pores open, yield
juices that color me the shades
of heat; the browns of new-
chewed leather.  Your breath
rubs me.  Gentle undulations
thrill my almost open and ever
waiting body.

But you cannot reach me where
it counts.  Oh, would I give myself
naked, your lover, exposed.  I
would be unafraid.  As it is I
look in the glass at your outline,
rub the places for you, reaching
for the juices you should
lick but don’t.


Caroline Shank

What i didn't know Daddy was
all the world of pain and beer.
I know you drank every night
just to slam the lid on your
mental sandbox.

The carnival of crazy that
lingered just beyond your
front door was a lapsed
Catholic's Purgatory.

You know about Purgatory,
I know you do.
The Dantesque
living room.  
I insinuate decorum
here, the bedroom stale
with fetid odors.
Cigarettes and the
unwashed
once a redheaded
beauty.

My legs ache as yours did.
No rest anyway.  Before
research.  Before the
salve of pills to calm
the crawling kicking.

I never knew Daddy that
my nightly misery was
portraiture to your pose.

You never asked me.
Never said you needed
help.  I blamed it on
the sleeplessness of a
soprano screaming

Did you know I couldn't
sleep?



Caroline Shank

I write to please the gods of
unloving.  The manuscripts
are read in the dark. Red eyes
pierce my dreams. I am a
pencil with yellow lead.

Only the darkness can read
the heavy lines of Purgatorial
rhymes.  I do not like rhyming
I'm not very good at it.

I am a mangle pushing out
sheets of my mind,
wrung for you.
Don't say that.  You don't want
to matter.  I have listened
to the susurrus of that tune

before.

I scribe my songs
on parchment skin…
I am a private person.
It is alone that I belong
to this notebook.   It's the
scores of fifty years of

watching for you.  Gone now.
Everywhere are the trinkets,
the baubles.  Even the cat is
quiet. Her quest
to find you is
exhausting.  

I write to the sound

of me calling
you
in the dark..


Caroline Shank

October's nights
lay on us
like wet skin.
Leaves everywhere.
Gold soaked medallions
in the early dark.

We walk the city's
sidewalks.
Shadows hold
daylight under drains,
to be released into
tomorrow.

Dusk now rinses down
foggy wells.  Deep
grays baton the
process.  God's promise
released in a
quotidian embrace.

We go on.
Each to another.
The whiteflash of the
walklight sanctions
movement.

We cross the street,
bridge the evening,
listen to the cafe
music as we pass.
Rainwet faces.
Smiles that dim at
the ends of days.
We kiss.

October's evening
shuffles into night.

O Domine!

Caroline Shank

Write what I know?  I am pocked with
chunks of broken moments.
Bits fall to the ground, trip me.
The terrain of my youth is a
moonscape.  I know what I know in
the craters of this place.

Born on the darkside and thirsty, I was
cold.  I found the sun later when I
was tumbled out the door of my
Mother’s leaking house.  Her screams
had become tentacles of maniacal
music.  Or do not call it music for
if you heard it you would not dance.

I am old now.  The view from my landing
is filled with sunlight and children,
“There are children in the leaves,
laughing excitedly”.   (Eliot)
I am paused in this imagination on
occasion.

When she is quiet,
I sweep her under the porch
where she lies drunk and unlaughing.
I do not let her out.  Yet she
steers me.  Her corpse loud
in her ***** nightdress.  

The terrain of my old age is pitted
with the debris of this haunting.  She
unsings me, makes me lie in
craters from which I climb up
daily only to tumble back down,
to have to begin again
from the bottom each new **** day.

But I sing as I crawl. And
she does not like the sound of that

Caroline Shank