I cried when Rozy died.  Great
clutches of gulps.  The next two
deaths left me undone.  No tears
left in my account.  We are all
but flashes of light by Buddha.
We are bubbles in a summer
sky.

I have used up my allotment
of sorrows and the emptiness
of my soul is deep and quiet.
Hear fellow wanderers you are
not alone.

Among the stands of people
whose silence is felt to be
flannel resolution I am to tell
you to wait for sorrows too
incredible to be bourne.
You are in the company of
dryness, of desolation.

God will send you to your
knees in the Great Relief
of terrible sorrow.  Then
you will begin again.  You
will be safe, inevitably, in
the silence and quiet
contemplation that those of
us who have passed dispair
find in every day things.  

Then death Will Have No
Dominion and tears WILL
flow and water your fertile
communion.

And I? I sit alone
and quietly
reflect.  


Caroline Shank

Haiku.    Snow

Winter comes early
The leaves are not yet raked in
The snow covers all.

Not everyone believes in Angels
but I do.  Sweet singing below
hearing, at the heart of feeling.
Angels are wide white lace
that enfold me in my deepest
sorrow and my highest joy.  

I trust the whirl and whoosh
of them. I catch sight of them
on the side of my eye when
I am not even looking

Angels announced the coming
of Jesus and His going.
They whispered to me the day
my children were born.

I see Angels in the look of loved
ones.  They flutter above my
every day and lay me down
to sleep at night.

I see Angels in the corridor.
sweetly singing homecoming
to patients and embracing
Angels sylphing through me
as I work.

And in our sorrow Angels hold
our faces where tears fall.  Angels
kiss our souls with love and gently
bring us home.

Caroline Shank

Christmas is not going to perform
for me again this year.  Not going to send me to the five and dime for
shreds of tinfoil or hooks of candy.

Song sung blue over the white
and drifting snow.  I remain
dans la grotte.  Why?  You might
ask.  Tomorrow the Wise Men
start their slouch
toward Bethlehem,
unencumbered by gifts.

Joy is not running through
me.  Starlite, star bright,
I wish you would come
home tonight.

Far away you send sorrow.
I package it in used boxes.
I will sit for twelve days and
twelve nights.  Alone.

I will *******
another Christmas and
count to forty.  It's what
I do.  I am blistered with
the wait.  

When you come home I
will handstand myself
with joy.  It's been the
journey of my life to wait
for you. My face to the
Star, again.

Next Christmas I will celebrate
you.  Home from afar,
I will wrap myself in your
name.  You will open me.  

Please.

Caroline Shank

It's a rainy day in the usual
cool of Wisconsin in the
dark months.  
There are  hundreds of shades of
gray and dun.

I am wide awake and missing
the sunlight of better times
when my soul prospered.
The sweet taste of warm on my
face.  You on my mind and
long walks.  I have grayed out
the summer
days when
you were the only thing on
my landscape.

Winter has turned all my
thoughts to long shadows
of memory.  You were never
gray or dun colored.  You
are inside me in colors of
radical brilliance.

Tomorrow I will assign the
sorrow.  Today the fragility
of missing you is like fine
single panes of memory I
cannot shatter.

On most days you lay
quietly in the soft room
of yesterday.
Today you are restless.
I shake myself awake but
the dream insists.

I'm old to myself while you
remain young in the roundness
of a single summer.  The fabric
of warm on my nascent love
has pins and sticks me.

Don't walk in.  I am
not available.  My hair is no
longer the color of amber,
My tan limbs are startling
In their denial of tan.

I think of you throughout
poetry. The long lines
of unmetered days return
but I get on.

Mistake me not for ignorance.
The vocabulary of my life
begins and ends in
four
short
months.

Caroline Shank

I don't think you know about
the stain above the line of my
sight.  The colors that keep changing with each breathing,
the syllables that won't stay still.

There is a blot on my brain
that smears thoughts into a
puddle.  Did you ever see
yellow reach out like a
tentacle?  It grabs whatever
it can find.  Red is next, a
little less demanding but
still impenetrable.  

It's the blue that can ****.
Uncontained it flows over
my mind like a silent wave.

I can't show you because
I don't know the magic
phrase that makes the
inkblot go away.

Is it in the rainbow when God
said we are alone now?  I
flay in the flow of the thought
that we got on the boat in
the first place.

You cannot see what I hide,
from even myself.  You may
hold me, and if you can, find
the color of safety.

Caroline Shank

.

I cannot rival your blue eyes
Or the whirling
winds of your infinite skies.  

Windworn leaves tumble at
your step.  Winter turns to
summer where you are.

Walk to me slowly that I may
savor the trail you leave on
your way to my page.

I write you into time.  I hear
the bells ripple.
I have seen you travel in dreams.  

You leave me always wanting
you more than there is air above
me or ground below.

Stay where I am for now.
Use me with love.
Your song.

Caroline Shank
11.19.1 9

The wind is cold, the night is long.
I never sleep.  You are gone.
Swirls of pain
surround me and I leave my
body behind.

I cling to the fastness of thought,
somersault through millennia
to witness you through the
blinkless eye of light.

Time is an illusion.  We met
in the unformed moment of
creation, chased each other
around the universe.  A
cosmology of wonder.

Now, at the last,  
moments of my life
collapse down  
death like ivy on
winter bricks.

Caroline Shank

Tomorrow creeps, no wait the
Bard already used that line.
Let me say that tomorrow slings
it's way into me. It's like an
arrow from the Promised Land.
Tomorrow whips across me. I
wipe the sweat of it with
a damp hand.

Panic wets me like rain.  It
waits for tomorrow which,
collides with today and my
fists ball in terror.  Sleep
never soothes this breast,
it barely makes it in the front
door.

I breathe deeply, or try to.
What will help is greatly
misunderstood.  A prescription
for today to stop tomorrow.
Which will slam me to the
floor anyway.

I shake myself awake.  

It is always today.
I stumble on.

Caroline Shank
10.27.19

It's when the tears dry up,
when the arms are no longer
feeling the loss, when unkissed
the days end that sorrow becomes
memory only and the flat back
of yesterday loses color.

Try harder to replace the moments
strangely forgotten, to remember
the trust, to relive.  Wrapped in memories that once slayed
the dragons of doubt only to
find the pieces of a life unloved
after all in simple shards incapable
of stinging that the ends of
believing are achieved.

This ceases to be a cause for
fear, this lost labor at last
unexpected but tired with
unstrain and blurred with
yesterday's tears.

To lose is always a shock.
To cease to be moved
is a thud in the soul of time.


Caroline Shank

There is in the wind a name
so strong, so implacable as
to pass through the strongest
resistance.

There are in the sky arms so
warm they capture the prayers
of everyone.  The nuances of
language are known as a
thought blown to Heaven.

There is a star for each person
that outshines even the brightest
glow.  

Stars are born on the cusp of
love.  There is the whirl and twirl
of cosmic dust which brings
names to things.  

Your name was sprinkled on me
before the beginning of
the bang from which cosmic
destiny emerged.

It is only through the dancing
of dust that we find
each other covered in the
molecules from which
we are all born.  Through
which we will incarnate
together forever.

It is the cosmic dance, said
Maude, that "there are all
kinds of observable differences"
which makes every moment
ineffably perfect. Every encounter
unique.  We are all there ever
was or will be.  A swirl of magic
wrapped around us.  

We are all borne on the breeze.

Caroline Shank

(I've seen fire and I've seen rain.
No wait that's been used.
I always knew someday you'd walk through my door… no not that either.)

I walk downtown and there
you are.  I watch your long
unseen smile catch you
unaware when you see me.

There are fragments of that
smile in the shop window.
You reach to catch
my hand.

My memory flickers with the
walklight.  Four seconds to
caution.  Three, two, 1, I run
slowly to your waiting arms.

I float, no wait, I glide to
the other side of the street.
Trust is flung aside, the
movement of air on my face
brushes the air on your
face through the sunlit
afternoon.  

I am a ripened Autumn leaf.  
I slide into the present
moment aware at last
I am a dreamer in a blue
lawn chair.

Caroline Shank

In this circus of the mind,
you are the dreamraker, the
seller by the booth of riches.
You are the daylight’s yellows
and the blue stratum of sleep.
We knew each other in the
shadowless angle of noon,
bartered minutes, collected
seaside the shells of
poetry.  You opened the door of
tents.  The edges of the sand’s
various galleries collapsed
into rivers, opened into books.
You are the sheik of araby, the
dream-maker, the purples
mornings brush in the eyes
of wise men.

Dreams surrounded the day’s
median.  Time was, red was the
color of afternoons pressed
against us.  Now the tents
move nearer the water than
you.  The past is covered
canvas, the future is the wet
unbroken fabric of beach.

The bazaar closes, tents fold,
pictures painted on the moon’s
memory move on.  You and I
walk to the uncut littoral,
carve footprints in the cool
green silence, the first morning
of the world.

Caroline Shank

The fires are determined to rub
out the names.  The paths of
thousands of years.  Gone.
The Great Aboriginal voices
are spread thickly through the
ash.

Tomorrow is irrelevant.  The
peace pipes are gone.  The fires
littered.   The White faces cross
California.  The scores are
zero.  The scorched ground
bereft.  

There is a song sung in sadness
among the stumps of sacred trees.
There is a wail from the White
souls.  The Indian sorrows whisper
sympathetically.  

Alone in the smoke.  Our
children dare to rebuild.  Hand
in hand the Ancestors applaud.

Caroline Shank

The cinders under my bare feet
jabbed me in my hurry to the
beach.  The path down from
the street to Silver Lake was
short but painful.  I rushed
running to the shore.

I learned to swim from a wonderful
lifeguard.  From 1st to 2nd to 3rd
rock I spent the summer of my 10th year swimming in the freezing
spring fed lake.

I swam flat out like a fish.  
I listened for his whistle under
water.  Come up,  he summoned me to the top.  I shimmered like a
shook trout in my rainbow eagerness.

I was a pebble unknowing
that my fate washed me up on
the shore
the day I felt the first young
flung feelings of love.

I shot through the ends of
latency like a star.
I never felt it ringing.



Caroline Shank

I studied a little mythology, some Jung, a tad Freud.  I've read Durrell and Robertson Davies among other things.  I am in tangles over
myself.

My Id  is full of archetypes.  My
Ego is aware of my upside down
Superego.  My parents were
Very ******* up. It's no wonder
I lick my fingers before I eat
the soup.  It's the Golden Bowl
thing.  I think that's it.

I am populated with fantasies.
I can fly around the sun w/o
melting, visit Grandma and slay
dragons before lunch.

I save my children from the
Gorgons around them and
clean their faces when they
are done.  It's a hero thing.

I can ****** Poseidon when I
feel like it but that ****** trident
undoes me everytime.

I was your Anima when I was
younger now I am your crone.
I could never get Siggy to
realize that.  It was in a coke
cookie moment I gave my
soul to Shakespeare and
died old and unrepent.

It is in mythology that
you love me. Only me
and Forever.

I am Everywoman.


Caroline Shank

Tomorrow creeps, no wait the
Bard already used that line.
Let me say that tomorrow slings
it's way into me. It's like an
arrow from the Promised Land.
Tomorrow whips across me. I
wipe the sweat of it with
a damp hand.

Panic wets me like rain.  It
waits for tomorrow which,
collides with today and my
fists ball in terror.  Sleep
never soothes this breast,
it barely makes it in the front
door.

I breathe deeply, or try to.
What will help is greatly
misunderstood.  A prescription
for today to stop tomorrow.
Which will slam me to the
floor anyway.

I shake myself awake.  

It is always today.
I stumble on.

Caroline Shank

Everyday I look for you.
You navigate me.  

What I am
afraid of is simple.
Will you notice me in the
millennia since then?
Will the white hair
camouflage me?

It's better if I stop looking
for your red curls
along the sidewalks
of my past.

I am going to go to the
god of past bells to stop
the ringing of your name.
I will have no luck there
but I will try to get to
tomorrow without you.

You warm me, like those
summer steps in the rain.

Caroline Shank

(A portrait of a Lady
brushed across time.
A fragment of life one
afternoon in a poem.)

She drops through your
memory like music from
a farther room.  Her death
is filtered.  Colors
are flowers on the grass.

You are a prism or a vessel.
You come and go.
Time goes into stone.
Pain is a fossil.  It will
be here a billion years.


Caroline Shank

We met in the early days of the planet.
I remember the radical color of your
amber hair.  There were curls there
that only the gods made.

I remember you.  I loved the simple
act of breathing your name.  Prehistory
awakened in me the sovereign blessing
of your inimitable love.

I remember you, do you remember me?
Someday you will be here again and
we will know the depth of the night,
the height of the day and the
remembered purr of our bodies.

I wait here on the divan of day.
You will breathe my air again.

I wait.


Caroline Shank

I miss the real photographs.
The leaves of pictures I turn
over. The names and dates.
The high school graduation
memories.

My babies growing up when
film was their reflection of
summer and school. The
birthday parties slightly
blurred, a little out of focus.

The didital cameras next
with their zingy zoom.  A
little clearer now blurred
by tears.  

I hold these images to be
self-evident memories. I
hold them to my face to
smell the suntan lotion
and the scents of pine and
snow.  The birthday candles.

I choke on school pictures.
New haircuts each year. The
leather of first days.

The photograph albums are
stored for space.  I miss the
luxury of turning leaves. The oh wows of yesterday's Kodak
captured babies little butts.

My phone has a thousand
pictures In the palm of my
hand

I never look at but can
share in email in a
solipsistic minute and
click to the end.

Caroline Shank

We have ridden camels
in the Kalahari,
Flew Eagles over Canada,
walked across the Niagra.

We have boated up the
Nile and pierced the
catacombs of Rome.
We made love by the
red rock in Australia.

Our adventures overlap
memory.
We've spun the Sun and
tossed the moon,
walked on coals,
groomed gorillas and
climbed to Lhasa.

We were married in Tibet,
among the Chinese stalls,
made our way to India
and slept with tigers.

The planet swings
as we kiss, and spins
to the rhythm of Joy.


Caroline Shank

Karma brought me here.
I meditated long enough
to realize the sun beyond
the gloom.
I found in the **** heaps of
a life only crippled a piece
of light.

Karma is a whisper.
caught and warm.
It is the song
through which I dance.


Caroline Shank

I dream too much.  I have an
imagination the size
of a planet.
I stay up all night, sleep
like a cat.  Watch movies
on the TV.

I sink and rise and
sink again. Dream
sporadically
of you.  

I think of
past loves.  
It's what getting

old does to me.  You are
the audience for my poems.  
Language is unspoken.
I doze until

Six A.M. when all
my senses call me
to beware.  The night
is hiding and my
thoughts fade into
daylight.

I am on the way
to yet another
dream.

You are the
music.

Tango me tonight?


Caroline Shank

We met in the early days of the planet.
I remember the radical color of your
amber hair.  There were curls there
that only the gods made.

I remember you.  I loved the simple
act of breathing your name.  Prehistory
awakened in me the sovereign blessing
of your inimitable love.

I remember you, do you remember me?
Someday you will be here again and
we will know the depth of the night,
the height of the day and the
remembered purr of our bodies.

I wait here on the divan of day.
You will breathe my air again.

I wait.


Caroline Shank

I am reminded of your face
when the wind blows over me,
when the sun's light shifts
to summer.

We knew each other
in the solstice of our
lives once.  You turned to
me and the light streamed.

Remember me in that light.
My hair not yet quite white.
Remember me in the
while of time.  I was the
wine in your glass's
reflection.  You were
the glass in my
Waterford world.

Run to me.  But know I am
fragile, still afraid.
You left me in the rain.
Come to me now
in the sun
of your returning.



Caroline Shank

The sky is blue, the water green,
the sand is white and the Seagulls squawk.

The squish between my toes is friendly.
Try as hard as I can I find
no joy.  

The children dash about and
mother's call.  The red
bathing suit of the toddler
shines and is beautiful.

The lovers on the blanket
kiss, oblivious to my gaze.

The sun is strong, the breeze
is glorious.  The lifeguard
watches the bathers from
a ladder high off the ground.

I walk, alone, along the shore
holding no one's hand.

The salt air is filled with the
smells of Sunday.

You are off to the wars and
I am walking to Tipperary.

Caroline Shank
10.18.19