I'm tired she said as she drifted
away to the sky of someone
else's blues. The sun of pure
understanding regaled her
until her sentence ended.
Oh God of desperate climes

rescue her before the clifs
of lost dreams win and
she dies in her dreams.

Caroline Shank
1.11.2023

Mary looked up to see tears
on Joseph's cheeks. She.
was exhausted.  The trip that
ended in the birth of her baby
was a flight out of Egypt

Tomorrow she would be in
quarantine. The contamination
of her body must be resolved.

Theirs was a strict following.
Her blood must never touch
hallowed ground.

The baby boy slept, unaware
of the Laws.  

Mary felt the sweat of her labor
dry stiffly around her forehead.
The World would wait.

Jesus's was the singular cry.
The long last breath of Hope
sweet on her face.  The
foreshadow of someone's
salvation loosed.

Mary sank into sleep
safe that she and the
baby could begin the
long journey to Calvary.

Did she know the last
of a mother's desperate
clinging to the moment?
Jesus smiled at her.
Cry
Mary brought light into
darkness, fuel into a cold
night and a will of

determination to sound
down
the Corridor to
this

Magic reenactment of

Religions signification.

Mary rested with her baby
for oh so short
a

Time.

Caroline Shank
12.24.2022

I have seen the marble arch
and was not afraid.  The
comeliness of it's curved
surface paused me. Your
song whispered of birds

felting by, of fallen kings and
reasons.

I have time on my hands to
listen. Hallelujah.  For my
steadfastness in love has left
me

bereft.

I swore to all the kings in the
Bible. I offered my skinned
knees, for solace that I was heard.

Hallelujah

There are cracks in my head,
my ankles are shackled.  No
music but a laugh echoed
side to side.  

I will go down to the river to
find God.  Your repertoire
is complete.

Why a monk Leonard? The
music of the ages was written
without your melody and
I sank beneath the river
like a stone.

But you're not there.  Your
music sustains me.  I walk
out, wet and cold.  

Hallelujah.

I am redeemed from the
nightmare.  I step on your
music as a soft petal.

I am for a moment, relished
and shriven.  

Hallelujah


Caroline Shank

Daughter of my life you are
still so fragile.  

I wait for the phone call that
will come any minute

Someone come and help me.
I grieve for your childhood. The
weather of our lives before
storms drove me underground.

You did your head to the
storm thing. Face forward to the
landscape of your reality.

I, underground, hid your self
against me.  I rode the waves
of your addictions.

To this Winter day I have only
the remnants left of your
early years. A few pictures,
a stuffed animal named Coffee.

You cannot come back to me.
Gone are your bounce and
the hugs around my waist.
Your tears that filled my brain
with helplessness.

You are all alone in this trap
of my mind.  The madness
slips through me.. Your tears
are but dry sand.

I want no tears to your
intentional desertion.
Silence to your pleas, and
old music before you

were

born.

Caroline Shank
12.18.2022

Help me make it through
Oh God of my unknowing
Brace MY name unto
even the farthest heartbeat.

The clocks dim.
I no longer hear the
movement.
.
Hand of years, the
children and the
getting. Minutes
bend the geography.

Take
me to the
honeyfields.  

I lie
down

to Sleep

I pray.



Caroline Shank
12.16.2022

Reflections on a Wednesday
              Afternoon
  
While waiting for an appointment,
I am **** bench numb uncomfortable.
I glimpse the yellow corn fields
out of the window…

I am sixteen.  The Autumn
of my last New York year.

Oh no, I am not dead like
the girl in the book I read.

I'm old and my youth
touches me.  I no longer
jump like a girl, but i
observe.

The traps and snares of
memory, alive among the
detritus of those years
dump into my basket
like fishy Fridays.  

We had a cat as
white and feral as
lightning. She would
lick the Friday platter.
We worried about the
bones.

But I digress.

The corn leans in, a
deliberate stretch
to hear the sounds I
left

I was a child of the 50s.
So long ago.  

The memories
are squashed

by the army
of commuters

who always
smote my

songs.


Caroline Shank

Your early inborn magic did not
fortell the whirls and winds
of the future.  The shine of
youth ended in turbulence.

Dismania, like fingers, touched,
you.  Ivy on brick, the tendrils
pierced.  Walls of
uncertainty nourished
and you, welcomed the

future.



There were no tomorrows.

Pulling you through the
mirror of myself you tore

into
uncertainty.

No Magi, not even
with gifts of surcease
brought by the force

of love
released you.


Still the running child
you crash into a future
whose spiders claw at you.

Tomorrow waits
protected
by your addiction.

Reach into the future
all you want,

you cannot tear the
crawl of your destiny

away.


Caroline Shank
10.13.2022

Morning has broken 🎶.  The song
of a single bird brings down night's
shadows, chimes the diurnal
trill of a new day.

The same shiny blue glare
everlasting.  

Gathered moments.

Groceries for the soul.


Caroline Shank

I. The wind blew.

The journey was rough.
They bent to avoid the
amber sand.

Joseph was fierce in his
Orthodoxy

Mary encircled the
Child. Tonight
would change
The World.


II. Bethlehem

Jesus CRIED, the
wind  stopped,
         the

Light of the World

        Arrived.



III.  Christmas.

   The
journey of the Magi.

The storm burned in
the night  A voice
In the wilderness
shouted.

Peace came briefly.
Midnight

slouched

toward Bethlehem


Caroline Shank
12.10.2022

He caught her thinking.  The
crossed legs signed
resignation.

She'd bloomed and thought
that tonight was lost

to expectation.

He rested his memory
of her smoke filled
denial.

Nothing left emptied
emotion.


Caroline Shank
12.9.2022

They're all dead, the men who
loved me in the backseat or
on the water bed.  Or not.
Or mostly.

Bless please the memory
of warm nights and street
lights.  The rock and
roll of hips blinded by
loves.  The music

of traffic going by.


The voices of love in
the night.  Rhythm
me now.


I loved the rhyme of hips,
the Song of
Throats rolling and
sibilant.  

Ghosts who haunt me.
Let us pray.

Come to me tonight.
Rescue me from

long nights with the

Lamp's signal's

Flash incessant.


Caroline Shank
12.6.2022

You were young, on the
cliff of summer. Amazing stirring
possibilities.  Running in
the rain.  Stars hid.
Crepuscular love on
the brink of light.

Wet and loud you toked
a joint without me.  You
footed the soil.  Your
name became reckless.

Young is not the only way
your wet strings tore at
you. Screams from the
doorway dove into the
beds of dead flowers.

Many years spinning and
the muddy leftovers of
yesterday toe the mind,
eclipsing memory.

It is waiting that brought
you to this place.  Your
red hair under the
Summer sky shone.

The years after the caul
lie on your thoughts, reluctant
to uncover nascent
feelings.

You inhale.

I write to bring home the
surreal sun on the skin
of time. Before

you left
me.

Caroline Shank
12.5.22

I was alive when it was important.
Being a woman before it was undone.
The glance across the room, the
air laden with innuendo.

The bartender who lit my cigarettes.
Rob was his name. We met one
evening over laughter.  The tail
end of the evening and an hour
across a stripe.

My dress a little two short, eyes
brimming with signals of which
no gentleman would  hold me
to account.  

It was important to be a woman
before the androgyny of manners
became the moment  that passed
me by.  

It was only important,
before you took me in your car,
awkward groping, visceral noises,
importance worn down to small
sounds, after.

It is not important to be anything
since I am past 75 years
of age and my  ways
are gone and

you

can't see me wildly

search your face

for

recognition.



Caroline Shank

The fracture of illicit love
cannot
escape the seismic clash.
We enter into time.  A breech

butting of tomorrow into the
canal of forgetting, For who
can remember the slide of
yesterday?

We slipped like ice  
into the breaking curren'ts
urge to melt.   We canceled
the moment, repealed the
lesson. Stripped of

experience, we rushed into

love's last

Forever

Embrace.



Caroline Shank
11.29.2022

What have I to say to you?
whose world is a spinning
Inn?  I want to stay awhile
where you are the boatman
for lost and lonely waifs.

Treasure me with your song,
I will soothe you with my
sighs.  Sing boatman?

Bring me
to my knees.

Sounds are the oar
with which I stay

Forever.

Caroline Shank
11.25.22

Along the dun street
where her shoe's sad
heal broke,

the early summer morning
moving tic toc's.  Bruised from
your grip on the blue back
stained rip

as she left her purse on the
dresser.

Tired, she was sun smudged.
Her maroon hair's curls lay
like small sea creatures,
ringlets of the aftermath.

The cataclysm of your
*******.  The quite
almost toppling from
Grace embraces shared
skin the color of

tapioca.

The blank side of
yesterday's

shouts

came with her soul's
cry of

Victory!

Tired was the force that
finally chilled
the memory.

The climate still
Humid.   The garden
growed.



Caroline Shank

Addict

I am tired of living
with your splayed try to
foist the spines of addiction
away

from me.  The weather
of your withdrawal is
unpredictable.  It talks
to the walls of silence
muted to the unfaithful.

Tomorrow is a deflated
balloon.

You fall on your knees in
supplication to the god
of *******.  There lies
missed opportunity. There
is your unmade bed, cracks
of daylight

in the seams of
misunderstanding
You, whom God made
is the unformed image
of life that lies on the

bed of unlove.


Caroline Shank
11.22.22

I will drink loneliness in my
coffee. The sweet is turned to
sorrow, the cream is the stir
of tears.  

I will not last this.
The table was set when you
strode into darkness.

I will pin loneliness on the board.
The same letters unwrite.

Half a century is not enough
to unbelieve.  The scattered
seconded invitation is
laid green and turbulent.

I leave loneliness a song
to the unbeliever.

You fold my intention like
a glove broken in.

Winter is always the last
cry in the dark sound
under the stairs.

I leave the sounds of the
wheel under my
shoes, in Winter unsounds
tears that dry in eyes
of the unbeliever,

you, walk like steel cleats
over my poems.


Caroline Shank

was a dark haired Jewish
boy with curls like black
streamers around his face.

He danced me
on stockinged feet.
We Lindyed to the music
until all the girls were snapping
fingers and tapping toes.

It was a long time ago.
this boy was willing in
my life.  He gave me
flowers and songs,

dreamers and
forever…


Caroline Shank
11.9.2022

I will write

A new vocabulary carefully grown.
Words light with the scents of
recognition.

poems
you have to look for, create sounds so
elusive only in your freest moments
will you feel them passing through
you,

beating gently between beats,
singing between notes,

sliding like
silk between that which you know
and that which you want.


Caroline Shank
A long time ago

Feel the change of the
Seasons.  The light in
streaks on your arm's
red hair.

The wind, on a good
day, God's embrace.

Feel the change of the
Seasons amber tossed
curls.  The whitening
pelt, earth's embrace.

The nearby squirel uneasily
counts her chestnuts.  She
reminds the tree of
riddles.  What? Nonsense.

The tree offers only comfort,
a remainder of the turn of
the shadow's dance into
rest.

Walk thru the Pillars of your
imagination, feel only the
seasons past and to come.

Feel the change
sweeping the
cooling light under into
that drains winter whispers
to…

Stop the moment from
beginning its turn to and

away from the primordial
Image of

you in Summer's arms,
mine,

still willing.


Caroline Shank

Everybody sings Hallelujah.  The
long song Leonard penned.

So many verses, so little we know.
Read the lyrics.

Life happens while poetry
is carved out of the soul of
dead beats.  We sing

the notes of no matter.

I read outhouse news on
the back words of
Marianne.

She went clear.  Who knew?
Seek the hymns and you
reap the elevation of the
******.

Hallelujah is in the sharp
side of writing.  It found

you, inevitably, on my
kitchen chair. The song
is to you, I failed the

class.


Caroline Shank
11.5.2022

I confess all my Sins.
But I cannot Atone to you in
your far away and never.

I lost you to Wind and Grace.
You were Silence when I
was Loud.   Always Polite
when I was Rude. No not
that only but say my Excursions
into Life were Alone.  You didn't
Ask.  I was not Infected with the
Desire to Tell.

Now you are Dead and i am
asked to Atone.  That I
Loved was the Death of my
Soul.  You did that.

I Cry now when you are
Gone.  I was not Kind as you
lay unfolded.  I loved you
in uncounted ways.  We
Touched the Edges of your
Dementia alone in the same
room.  

I Write this with your Kindness
to me like some Damoclean
Event about to Unfold.

Tomorrow will be the Currency
of my Poor attempts to

Apologize.

Death has worn me out.

I Write because i cannot
Speak.  Cry because i
cannot Forgive.  Life has
broken open the Capsule
of Reality.  

I am Fettered
and

Alone.

Caroline Shank

I.  She watched. Her
patience wrapped around
her like a shawl.

She saw him
touch the girl.

Then he was gone.

      II.  She will write
her poem now.
    
   III.  It is her dream.

IV.  This suggestion.
Her
imagination.

V. He arouses her

most intense

Desire.


Caroline Shank
10.22.2022

Even the birds are quiet,
This household of years.
The clocks rhythm is to
your heartbeat.

No one here knows the
secret of unbelonging
The jewel that is hidden
beneath my crying soul.

The incessant wait.
The door that squeaks your
name in a long mantra.

Do let me find the core of
you, the deep of your gone
ness.  The shine of the seat
of your soul is under the
tears of thin smiles and
platitudes.

When all along the door keeps
shutting.  The snap of the
lock is crash to my whispered
prayer.  Profound is to the
leaf on the wind as the dreams
of nights long silence.

Coping is a sign on the road
that says goodbye.
The turn in the plaid of
letting go.

The winds of possibilities
blow over me to the breeze
of

songs.


Caroline Shank
10.27.2022

Purgatory

I forgot about Purgatory, the bus
stop of Catholic needs must have.
The clamor of prayers, the knee
in genuflection.  

Tomorrow I will go to mass.  I will
arbitrate with the voice in
confession.  To die in mortal sin
is my childhood's torment.  The
black robes of St. Patrick's priests.
Early mornings
with my Dad

The brown robes of the Franciscan
who stole my sins in high school.
I wasn't done with them.  I wore
pants and that angered him.  I was
not unholy just skirting the borders
of adolescence my own way.

But I digress.  Purgatory with all
those flapping carers preparing
my way to God Finally and
Absolutely. My prayers tabulated,
my envelope is unsealed.

I am old now and return the
Purgatorial wicker plate to the
transept under which lay
the dust of the unforgiven
travelers.
        Strangers in a strange land..  

The curtains whisper.,
I say penance.

Ten times.

Oh My God I am heartily… .

Amen.


Caroline Shank
10.17 2022

Italics Robert Heinlein

Death exits the vomitorium
on
     the left.
The chalice rattles.
     The king is dead.

(It  slammed into my head
     one night,
         when you were sick )

Before the circle it was said
   you
       were handsome and guileless.

(You attend again, your father, locked in
     in the sleep that has only one hand.
Tomorrow will solicit your stillness.)
        

My legs, old, are stumble, are
     shaken. I wobble

like a child.

(Watch the hands that hold
     yesterday.  Grip the rope. )

Wrench away.  Struggle.  I'm

tears,
     are bricks,
       I  tear my face.

You, beloved,
     gone in the morning.

Flowers, to the sun,

          turn

into your celestial orbit,


          burn.



Caroline Shank
10.16.2022



RIP Jim Shank
5.10.1938 to
5.03.2022

Base Camp

Unseen from here, the
summit, in a cloud, anchors
the landscape.

It is said there are corpses littered
among the crakes and crevices along
the pilgrim's path to atonement.

Let me walk among the thoughts, the
footsteps, the crawling supplicant's
prayers to reach the place where
climbers found the unimagined,
the windblown, the face of God
that insists on another

chance.

Let me be where you are, the
subside of a mythic mountain,
among the survivors who
recovered

love in the scree of

yesterday.


Caroline Shank

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.)

(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

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

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

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

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

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

Somebody burned the house
she said.
Frying steak.

Long live smoky kitchens
and those who are
called to the cause.

We are all molecules
in motion riding a
colossally failed experiment.

Non sequiturs abound in
my world.

Smokey kitchens.  
Metaphors.

I hang my head.
Slowly clear my
thoughts.

The kitchen remains.
the Abode.

There is nowhere

else

to go



Caroline Shank
9.26.2022

Tree limbs spike the
air.  Fingers
shred summer skies.
Wind is the
sliding movement
realized.

Life is rhythmmm.

Wind storms sand.
Red is the color

of skin.  Touch
forshadows response.

Bodies remain.
Awareness
regained.

September's shreds,
tears, shells.

Tomorrow hides
in snow.


Caroline Shank
9.25.2022

is a circle.
The
minefield of
breathing.

I inhale.

The rasp of a door

hinge.

Gone to rust.

Pieces of
time.

Jigged thoughts…

clang of
chains.

Soggy Days.

Lie wet
leaves.

Rain..

The air pushed.

Behind me a
young woman

falls.


Caroline Shank
9.24.22

Blue carpet.  Stones
between toes. Sun
seamed afternoon.  

You.

Salt foams on shores.
Wet kisses my dream.

Walk on. The
lights of South Beach
a kaleidoscope.  Moon
paths. Warm breaths
on my mouth.

Tide breaks.

Salsa brings the waves
to ******.

Daylight comes.


.
Caroline Shank
9.23.2022

The yard.
The wide green yard.  
The rooster lifts his
trumpet to the Lord.  

There is the song
he practiced for the
sermon.  The choir off the
fence.  The Duck plashed
and the piggie counted
down.

The Serenade, his song
of Songs.  

The chicks wait
as they
we're told to do.

Billy's coming home.

The wooden fence is
cleaned.  
His flag draped.

The song
ready.

Billy fell in the ditch of
Unknowing.  

His war
over.  

The Rooster cries,

Taps.


Caroline Shank

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

I'm looking for my husband.  He has
disappeared into some place inside
his mind, like a sea creature slides
into a coral bed.

Quick now, here he is for a moment
or an hour.  Like a Robin bobs in
the yard, he is beautiful in his song
before he vanishes into the sky,
flying above or around me.

Are his pieces forever gone? Will
I find a kiss behind my chair meant
for me alone? Will my sorrow erase
the years of love?

I will be brave today.  Tomorrow
I will be the coral he needs. A small
animal in a very large and
strange ocean. .

Caroline Shank
5.4.20

Everybody Cries with
Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Eyes are opened, floods of
crying, knuckles of gratitude.

Be the recipient of family lore.
Cry if you might, determine that
the path to history is wiped across
centuries.  Everybody Cries.

The album of black pages, the
erudition of Dr Gates, the heat
roiled by emotion is the evidence

of harrowing challenges, of
generations of breathing in
ancestral DNA.

I reject the family tree my
parents laid out as if it were
unique. The tiring conversation.

Dr Gates would not be interested
in the memoir of my mother's fantastical
ancestry.  Her blood was sanctified
by the Bourbons!

My father's "pig-**** shanty Irish"
was the ongoing lyric of our
youth.  Dr Gates would find
the lunatic fringe to which
I belonged unenlightened.

Today I will tear my history
from my mother's voice. I will
rejoice in my father's greatness.

(There is no such thing as the past,
Eliot wrote.  Many have argued.)

I paste my past into notebooks.
I am in

the final quarter acre of my life
and I am neither better nor
worse for the pages of my
family tree.

I am unholy and entombed
in a metaphorical  book

scribed

of an unconsecrated life.


Caroline Shank

9.11.2022

I submit to you the plan,
the blueprint,
the perfect wedding
day.  

The storybook sun of
an early fall afternoon.

Church people in  purple
and white congregate.

Congratulations are petals
on the browning lawn.

It's September of a day
pulled from memory.

The church bells scurry like
living tones let loose.
A random exercise
in hearing.

The early mark on a white
wall's
lifeline scars my woman's
soul.

Death makes the day's ride
a long goodbye.


Caroline Shank