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Caroline Shank Oct 2022
When men love they move slower
than dawn rolls onto day. Arms
turn toward each other as if to
grasp their beloved as raindrops
grasp the stalk of a flower,
melting around tender shoots
like silk wrapping. They whose
feet have always left sound
behind them, their prints
evaporate in whispers.

Men gather in bundles the
persons they have been, select
the best, the finest moments,
to plant by the porch of the
adored. They go through the
weather of their passion focused,
translated into a language as
sharp, as clear, as cries in
blue sea-gulled air when
nothing but nothing stands
between nature and desire.
The goal of movement is charged
across a world lost to all
desire for choice.

Men love with a kinetic so deep,
so intimate, it is movement inscribed
on every breath.

If then the moment should
come of the crack in the bell of
the heart, when daylight rips
the landscape, they fall, as a
rock falls, to crash along a
beach utterly void of life, to
become trilobite in noiseless
water, moved by the purposeless
shift of time and stone.

Caroline Shank


(This is the best I could glean about men in love. Being female may not have helped.)
Caroline Shank Oct 2022
(Nothing happens unless first we dream.
Carl Sandburg)


Wet leaves leave traces
on the stony path to
Dreamland.  I Have
slippery intentions.

Tomorrow will decay these
thoughts.  Mind's tricks
pretend that the wet
leaves slip

up.

The dream ends.

Nothing
happens.


Caroline Shank
10.11.2022
Caroline Shank Oct 2022
I am not a kind person.

At times
I trickle interest in what
you are saying.

Mostly
I wait for
noon on a hot
day.

The breath of a
thousand words
cannot reach

the craters of
stones dug
without care.

I am not a kind person.

Where you were,
dying,
it was
the nurses who
compassioned you.

My reflection was
hidden in the
still pool of your

leaving brown eyes.

I reek with sadness,
with the
penance of being

a ;ń/. alone.



Caroline Shank
Caroline Shank Sep 2022
Boredom opens the door to walk-ins.
Floats, like spoors in July, little
umbrellas of disaffection.

Tomorrow is the tattered breath
of the day before I met you.
It is the same.  The film is
crinkled on the closet shelf.

I clean around the thought
of giving the lash to tonight.
It is the last resort to
things unable to disseminate.

The hero shrinks of yesterday
are gone for soldiers everyone.
It's the hymn that keeps them awake.

(My mother shrieked through the
night.  In Summer the frogs in
the back shrank.)

You left with the rain.  I have
said this before.  Late afternoons
dredge.  Not yet suppertime
the waiting for night's numbing
power is interminable.

Sit there where I remember you
so I can lapse into stillness

that will bring the words sliding
songs.  

I

linger

Into drugged

dreams.



Caroline Shank
Caroline Shank Sep 2022
Panic spins.
I am a dervish without
a prayer.

Air pounds in my chest.
Sound is a slap.  
Thought is scrambled.

Breathless is a **** in my
stomach.  Flight is the
option.  Feathers fly.

The air is sand, filled,
unbreathable.
A storm screaming.

A rope
chokes me
into another
space from which
I fall disgraced.
.
Recovery is a movement
of clarity I receive from
your

lips on my

hands.

Caroline Shank
Caroline Shank Sep 2022
I have never walked here, like
this, before now.  Moist
footsteps follow me as dreams
follow after the
pain when the rains came
finally into the desert.

I have never knelt here like
this before now, by the sand’s
edge where grass grows
like green singing in a scenery
by Dali, perhaps.
This place with its
small hands combs the bodices
of trees. You run
fingers through the desiccated
leaves of my soul, water me.

I have never hiked into the
territory of your country
like this.  Day runs
down my face, drips off
soft moss which is your voice.

But I am here now.  I unfold
this poem of yours as the wind
blows which, when you open your
arms, releases the simple sounds
heard in the branches and leaves
of a friendship whose fertile
landscape grows its own singular,
philodendronous song.


5.1996
Caroline Shank Sep 2022
Plath wrote in a frenzy
just before she died.
She put all of the world's she held
so fragile into the sauce she

brewed in the London of her
despair. Her last thought was
Daddy.

Another ten years.

She was to complete her
poem's anniversary tome.

Plans fail.  

Au pair arrived
to no one answered the bell.

Plath, while her babies
napped,

waited.

She never knew.


Caroline Shank
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