Realization begins with a grassy
patch on the cheeks.  A loosening
chin.  Our eyes tear
a little in the woven years.
We get older, better.  We stop
weeding.  Time is represented
by the passage of linear
rows.  Memory, imagination and
the strings of movement flare.
Answers streak the imagination's
runways.  We used to be whatever we
were in those early youthful afternoons.
Now the flowers are loose and confident.
We plow the past in conversation.

Look at us.  Our age signs
the geography.  We rise from
a packed landscape, determine
the motion of the earth.  The
winds of the last forty years
blow from behind.

We form together.  
Clouds gather us in.
We raise flags.
Our answers are on the
breezes of the past.

We sing.
Our anthem is
a song
for the ages.


Caroline Shank

I wore blue flowers on my dress,
white flip flops on my feet.
I call this summer casual.
That was my dream. You
are not buried yet.  Soon.
I see me in the chaple
working the crowd.
Flowers in my hair.

You died on a Tuesday morning.
I was eating pizza.    I looked and
saw the flat face of death in your
beautiful eyes. You had no response.
I sat in the chair I occupied while
you were alas living.

There was no way of knowing your
deeps and shallows ebbed to the
middle of Tuesday.  There was no
more of you in my eye and I was
quiter than ever.

My dress is in the mail, my shoes
are in the closet.  I will wear blue
flowers on my dress and white  
sandals. I call this liberation.
I am released from dull gray and
the dumb dun serge you wanted
me to wear.

I sit here without tears having cried
for two months.  You are long away
and if not thinking of me you are
at last  peacefully free of trying.


Caroline Shank

I remember you in
the striped backseat of Tony's
car. The red leather seat's squeak
on my cheek,
and the pearl white ghastly plastic
door handles crushed my head.
I remember.
you with your duck tail
Haircut, dark brown, greasy
with Brylcream..  
It was widely known in
those days how your deep
broken brown gaze was
turned on me one evening
when I was fourteen.

The summer was over and
Winter's
clouds were layered on like

a stripe of a
gray leather.
You used language,
harsh in hearing,.  
shallow in response.

The story
is an old one and people
told it of me, just the night when the
red plastic shined on my face,
like a stripe of a scarf.
When your second wife
was so sorry you died
before your silver dove flew
over and I  was waiting
for your

apology.  



Caroline Shank
May 2, 2022

I remember you in
the striped backseat of Tony's
car. The red leather seat's squeak
on my cheek,
and the pearl white ghastly plastic
door handles crushed my head.
I remember.
you with your duck tail
Haircut, dark brown, greasy
with Brylcream..  
It was widely known in
those days how your deep
broken brown gaze was
turned on me one evening
when I was fourteen.

The summer was over and
Winter's
clouds were layered on like

a stripe of a
gray leather.
You used language,
harsh in hearing,.  
shallow in response.

The story
is an old one and people
told it of me, just the night when the
red plastic shined on my face,
like a stripe of a scarf.
When your second wife
was so sorry you died
before your silver dove flew
over and I  was waiting
for your

apology.  



Caroline Shank
May 2, 2022

I dont want us to evaporate like the
last forlorn drops in the jar. The stuff
you can't reach.  It's when you throw
away the lingering remains of a
once future promise you shake the
meanings off slick with the wetness of tomorrow.

"Some may say I'm a dreamer but
I'm not the only one." You were
promise and gone before I drank
the last dark remains of my beer.
I sang the songs of unbelieving
in the moment before you left me
in the summer's late night rains.

We were spoken of by gods
and goddesses.  The language
was curious and fragrant. Full
and lyrical.  Did you lose their
song?  It was a fabulous song.
I believed in the tune we wrote
together. Tomorrow will fill our
throats with the flattened notes of
a once flying bird.


Caroline Shank
April 28, 2022

You're Doing it Again


You're doing it again,
that habit of pulling me over, the
kiss behind my ear where you.know
I will never tell. I watch you
as you try to lift me.

Uunwritten and unsung the sound
of your one hand clapping, my nod
that tells you to fire the cannons.
I am deaf now. I watch as
your familiar hand reaches away
for the face you tried to draw
so many times.

More than that it's the daylight's
fading fingers at my throat.
I whisper a melody you recognize.  
Tomorrow walks in on time every
morning and I wait to see if you
are willing with me or if your stroke
on my face will be the last mewling
at the edge of a lie.

Caroline Shank
April 28, 2022

I have seen the moments of my
lifetime flicker and I was afraid.
I have won at love. My hair fell
long on your shoulders and I
laughed to see such a sport.

I have seen rhe souls of loved
ones shivver but I was young
then. I did not know your
Pain. I never knew you in your
lighter days. My heart pumped and
yet I sang then in my ununderstanding.
You were plaid in your dimensions
and red were the heartbeats
of our shared misunderstanding.

My feet then, a true size 8, were
made for dancing. I stepped softly
on your shoes and we were sway
and music.  The night's of our
repeatable dance's reps. Holy
in the church of our souls.

You didn't die then though I wish
you had. A million little deaths
over the years of sadness.

You were erased on a Sunday
morning
by the ink of yesterday's

Betrayal

Caroline Shank
April 17.2022

COVID

I am thrown pieces of virus's
scalding puke that took me
down into the warehouse
of lost memory.

My head shakes for the tears
which pour from hollowed eyes
the lack of simple names,
numbers and the wrinkled
lists of my failures.

I am overthrown by my own
mystery.  My long list of
minutiae trips me.  I am
unconscious.  Nothing
that is me is the cling on
that is all I have or am.

Covid rakes my mind taking
with with it the night in the
hospital.   The nurse who,
I am told, joined me when
her tasks allowed.

It is too much  To be so
erased until you have to call
the bank and plead for your
self in the numbers behind
the buttons which charge
our lives with permissions.

I sent my self on a journey
to sound the deeps of my
sorry mind.  I cannot know
the contents I do not know.

I am forced into redundancy.
I repeat names
of people and things I cannot
hold. There is no place at the
table where I presided before
the colorless spread of sickness
took up residence in the days
of my 75 years.

I am wiped on the arm of
illness.  I sneeze at the
passwords that are lost into
the soup of confusion.  You don't
know the shapes of the
sick citizens of my aching
head. The red blood cells
which lined up only to
fall.  

I cannot remember you. I
try to fill in the narrative
of the several weeks
weaknesses.

I am pulled ahead by
you who have loved
me.  I take the minutes
of this experience with
you my listener into
a frail future.


Caroline Shank
4.14.22

Before life ended, proof that
you can't climb the rope of life
with greased thighs. ( Surprise!
I meant that.) I slid to the ground.

You weren't there.  Being There, to plagiarize a title from Kozinski, is not
the act of a shuffled life.  You had
gloves to touch me with and I saw the
rubbed toe of your captoed still
shinning.  One foot up and hurry
now. Watch me watching you.

I slipped. Startled by the squeal
of your Italian leathers I fell off.
No garden here.  Far from
a successful climb I saw you
lurch in derision.  I couldn't reach
you anymore.  A simple mark, a
symbol perched like a poem
on sadness.  

I wrote this for you. My  
sadness wraps around
tomorrow.  
I make goodbye
go like the wind.


Caroline Shank
April 6, 2022

Tomorrow is the day my poem
is about you.  It's never today that
turns my heart to the rhythm
of the Gulf's.  
curved
shore. The dial always  tuned to
the meridian… south,.

Tomorrow I will write my poem
where I belong,
with you and long beaches,
canvas chairs and white gulls
screaming above our
heads along the shore.

Tomorrow, poetry will be
written and love consummated…

I write you anyway
Sammy,  Today,
Gray under shells
on a white
sand beach.
My *******
leak.

This poem
can't wait.


Caroline Shank
3.24.22

The birds are back. Little leaf sized
flutterfings of brown refracting
movement to some rhythm heard
from beyond the canopy.

Today is a whisper from across the
yard. The daylight folds into evening.
Tomorrow waits under the sunspotted
green leaves.  Will you be there
when the day's linger or race into night?

Caroline Shank
3.15.22

Soon I will die or be dead or
seemingly so.  I will not write
this document nor will I ever
be there for Spring has never

arrived.

You, who spent some time under
the tree with me will be gone,
Cynara.

My thin pages swirl from an open
book   I will not care. You, whom
I have never kissed will close the
hamper.  The lake will never be
the color of afternoons
pressed against us

This beach where once we sought
friends colors will bleach this poem

of ever even you.


Caroline Shank
3.3

Sacrament


Speak to me or don't.  I have heard
your words before.  In silence or in
laughter, suburban sunny spaces
or the city's hidden doorways

with a rush of air
on ******* uncovered
in the rush,
graced only by the statues
purple shadows.

The cautious heaving
from below tells you to be
ready.

Reach for my deepest shadow's
source, mine in me
the whispers of my throat's
taught moan.

Find the sun in my
embrace and in the
strength of my desire
only will we

have  drunk

the sacrament ,

.

Caroline Shank
2.22.22
No

Ilse told of many things:
The noises of the casbah,
ululations from the musky
throats of the wasted women.
Tent smells from a hundred
hookahs.
She had her destiny all wrong.  
It's the same old story.

Cold drinks, a hot town,
thwarted love.  
A kiss is still a kiss.

Bombs mix with the
night sounds.

Louie didn't call off the search.
The suspects lined up

The enemy blurred.

Ilse left.  
Her stillness is forever.
The gin is always cold,
the fedora is slanted
and for the moment
of the last Act:

A kiss goodbye.

Casablanca is in the night's
glare. I hold my glass.

I will always toast to love. .
ft
Goodbye is never
forever.

A kiss is still a kiss.
    
       As time goes by.


Caroline Shank

Soldier


He was perfect at loving me.
He knew the sweet spot.

He walked with me and
He talked with me.

That's a song.  I forget the rest
But i didn't forget him.

He appeared
like A Grace.

He took

A longtime
going away. .  

He left in the
rain.  

I am invisible now,
by your side.

Tomorrow i will write him a letter
and i will Trust.

Tomorrow i will do a lot of things.
Alone i watch him flailing in
the wheat's crease where it

spreads itself on the road.

Love is a sorrow to my
soul.   He is missed
by the flowers we planted.
His memory blossoms,
The pain of this soldier's
retreat opens every night.

Alone

I wear his medals and

rub the shine

of the

gun.



Caroline Shank

They had children and
war planes.  Muster at 0700
Bottles boiled, flannel laundry.
Grandma's coming over.  
Lunch buckets
with a sandwich. No beer.

Blue denim overalls were the fashion
of 1943.  Bandana covered curls.

They were not all Rosie's.

For some dementia was the result
of too much information. They were
brave in their trembling.

Attachment Disorder began
after the war
when the chidren were born.  

Awed at the

thought

that anyone at all
raced through the
day,
propelled
by the memories,  

of the noise of

the bombings.

The dead,

memories.

Toys flung out of cribs.  
They smoked
they tried to read books.

Several times a day the
War was lost, the real
battle, marriage,
and, for the second time,
the front, was drowning,
There was this OnIy stillness
inside.

They dared to muster the
laundry,
to listen to the
broadcasts from
the other room.

Gained
the rank of Rivetter,

they were received with juice,
drank to the dead and to
those who wished they were.

Caroline Shank
2.18.2022



.



.

This is the doctor's waiting room.  
Can you smell the antiseptic mixed
with the cigarettes everyone
smoked when I was a young girl.

The office had a funky smell.
There were lots of magazines and
always the Reader's Digest.
Sometimes I sit alone in the
pine paneled room, waiting..
My mother was never there.
Daddy tried to cope with all the
collosal wastes of time.
He worked hard
in the city. You know about my
mother already.  And the Dr.

The Dr was the only adult who
listened to me for much of my
Youth, it seems to me.
That was because of the Dr. Jane
novels I read over and over.

This catechism of lies
satisfied me. No not the Baltimore.
I know you thought of that
first thing.  This teaching taught
me to not say no to drunken

boys.  It told me this festering
resentment that took hold
of me then was never
a dream.  The poems of
romance and the failure that tried to
drip down my life sap into soil.

This Frustration
always was Magnified by
the mixture of gin and
the lost virginity at 15 to
a backseat ****.

The years have shown the lies
little girls chatechyse.  Except when
I had pneumonia.  

Later he said I was still too
ugly to go to school.  So I went
into the maw of my sixteenth
year.  I cinched my waist of
failures to my secret self.

Then I found out he was wrong.
Somewhat wrong.   I finished
with life at this point and waited for
you to reinstate the proscenium. That
was how I saw it.  Remember
how I cried when they played "the
Lion Sleeps Tonight?   It is the
song of decimation, of the Nihilism
you don't like me arguing with you
all the time.

My life is a tale you don't have
listen to. Careless, incipient,
amniotic dreams of an old
woman you just made love to.



Caroline Shank
2.17.22

Your father will be gone soon.
You will not mourn him until
Rachel refuses your own sorrowing
self.  Time like a water hose
with a short faucet will trick you
into thinking the end is not near.

It's me that needs you.
It is a lonely walk along
long grass.  You played soldiers
on the lawn of your father's gone
to seed everyone trod the clover
and yellow flowers watching you.

You will find the crossroads
to meet again if you leave him now.
His breathing is stress to you, his
failure like chains on a door
.
Take your time
while it still gives off a
fragrance
to memory that
is disbelief.

Go, take your cloak.
I tremble at your nativity.


I am an old woman who
believes in God and
not much else.  
You have turned
pride inside
to rest and think of
tomorrow.  Will you
be still be loved then

My son?

Caroline Shank
2.14.22

We are all  walking,  wounded.
Pedestrians on a planet we have
never been to before. I read that
someplace.  I don't mean to
place myself outside of literature
but rather as a note on the follicle
of philosophy. Entropy is where
I mostly find myself.
"the rest is not our business"

Do you remember who said that?
Another abstruse literary spot
on the book of where to go next.

I will write about this again in
some other poem. I do believe
tomorrow wakes us up to
new pages turned by some
gasp of wisdom.
Tomorrow and tomorrow….
is the cats contribution

She licks herself clean.


Caroline Shank
2.13.22

The pale face of morning
has not arrived yet.
The gloaming penumbra  of today
will break through and scatter
syllables of this dream across the
last face of today

I am going to try to write the haiku
I promised myself I would to
complete the seasons cycle.
It scares me to think that you
are going to see this attempt
to reach into tomorrow
and find in it the last vestige
of a psychiatric embrace
of all things Eliot.

Bring forth this
smothering  mother
of a morning,
The poetry
correlative of the condition
of this myth is a blessing.
This is a good thing
and lives in the sun's
bright chambers.

The grace rendered in the
skew of this is

a light that shines

in our imagination.



Caroline Shank
2/11/22

Spring

Clouds form.  Cold north winds
roll in.  We run toward Spring.
Slide.  You warm in me.


Caroline Shank

Winter stands on flat frozen feet.
Cold circles swirl, move and in
daylight masquerade.I am
blinded by the stinging swirl.
Here, near my window,
the cat's bowl rests
on the dark plank floor

This season's Specter, the
Ghost days wipe all memory
of high soft summer winds,  
a deep water, strong
and free summertime songs.

May I be patient with this winter
cold mutt of a gun down on the
wide hipped grey trench which
in summer feeds my poetry.

You may ask why I seldom write
these days.

I wait for you. I warm  
that for which you are
not responsible.
But like Mable in my poems

you sing.


Caroline Shank
2.10.22

You scorn the soliloquy
of my sadness.  The
ubiquitous wind of
Poetry.

But
I always thought the person to
love me would occupy
the spaces between  breathing.

That there, against words,
would be warmth and solace
from the years of loneliness.

But you did not risk my
poem's breathing.

Tomorrow I will go away to
where the disturbed vowels
tell of my reason.
I am the author
of my destiny.

You cannot bear
the blur of my tears
the cry of my years,
the sound of  broken
clefs,  
where once we sang.

I will trace the
notes of this diary,
across the pages of
time.

Alone, again
naturally. 🎼.




Caroline Shank
2.7.22

Are you sleeping up there in
the stone parapet in which
you spend your time writing
letters and showing how you
can trip the light fantastic

with no one watching. You,
where you retreat to listen
to music. To read your books
and with wine dream,
like Miniver Cheevy, of the
days of roses.

Do you think of me? My
perfume you were so fond
of.  Oh, how I adored you!

I am not allowed to climb
the steps to your so private
sanctuary.  The locked door
reminds me of your pledge
to God to leave me and the
child.  

We are not yours, not anymore.
You with your hunched shoulders
crying "That is not all, that is
not it at all."

Your dead heroes replace me.
I should have gone away before
I knew you loved me.  But how
could I?  I will tomorrow shows
me a new place to hide away.

Think of me when you are
inside with your plans and dreams,
and I am on the outside scrolling
across the long years in which
I am stranded.



Caroline Shank
4.29.20

Time Chimes

I call to you
from out the mullioned
window on the back
of my house.

Windows open to recent rains.  I feel the
soft air of yesterday before the crepuscular
failure of today. (I know, you hate that word,
crepuscular. You hate a lot of words.)

The last light of day lay like velvet
on my doorstep. A signal
to shake the lace curtains.
Wave to far years gone to
other lovers.  The vibrations
on my skin reminds me of you.  I am
old now.  These are memories of
when we were young and tan
and satisfied with a bed and a beer
and a joint shared in the upstairs room.
Now curtains slow as my breathing
slows.  I am comfortable in my
old chair here by the light.  The
mewling of feral kittens is music
enough.  

Night surrounds me.
The ocean is my song.
I am completed in my time.
You, my muse, are aware of
my souls quiet caring. The
sun sets where once we saw the
sky with blue eyes and shooting
stars.  Our destiny is a psalm
to missed timing and unlit
cigarettes.  

Hear me in your deafness
calling on the memories we
made like Michaelangelo.

Art is never a vehicle for
humans last only a
minute.

Time chimes in the
downstairs room
and I sing to myself.

Caroline Shank
2.1.22

You have walked into the destruction
of your mind and found a place there.
The detritus of a life lived in the face
of cancer, storms, and death abandoned
of the private letting go of acceptance.

You screened a life worth living
and found it wanting of love and
poetry.

Someday we will meet and
our faces, full of knowledge,
will know the relief of a rest
realized. The
nourishment of a kindred
moment of unmitigated
silence.

I will be your welcome.  I will
solve the enigma of two
lives waiting for a single
explosion.

We run now,
members  of the
cloister of our lives


forever.


Caroline Shank
2.1.22

You placed a flower in my
hand. We looked at each
other in the haze.
I gave you a long poem written
with the heat of our breaths
last bloomings.

It was in the days of our beach
that we walked through to
the last door. Time
burned where the ink
of my song, snug in the
bend, sang its last
goodbye.

"Time was, red was the color
of afternoons pressed
against us. " I wrote that to you,  
a tribute to love and to laughs,
and to syllables.

I am 75 now and read with
the cat on my lap.  She
knows the art of songs
sung in the wind,
with every sigh of her lovely
brindle colored breast.

Tomorrow she will bring
me no nearer to you
who sang, once, to me
in the

russet sand.


Caroline Shank
1.29.2022

My husband is ill and watches me
as I talk.  I clean him up and pretend
tomorrow there will be music.
We married in the
rain for luck.

Beware the white shoes that
pinch, the veils of tomorrow's
promises lie.
Shake the hair from
Sunday.

The children
are built from
undercover conversation.

We go along without a song.

We talk without a kiss.

In the still of the night
memories splurge.  The
flat back of the sax

plays out of tune.




Caroline Shank

I don't have for you, a leaf or
a stone or an unfound door,
no not even
the sound of the gate's
clicking.

Angel of my once beginning
broken,
home, blown down
around my wrinkled feet.

You are not allowed.
The abandonment of a love
affair under your careful
vocabulary, can only but strip
the remaining skin shined
mind.

Where else should I go to,
gently or torn away?  To
dream of better days? To
round the corner empty
after all.

The same birds in blue plumage
sing a little tilted now.  Though the
pattern is the same.

You don't see the war between
myself and you. You see
patterns where I walk in the
garden.  I see the soft brown
of yesterday curl adoringly
once around the house
and fall asleep.

I am out placed. The Angel
in the square told of my
forsaken, washed and combed
recumbent  wisdom turn
to ashes on the winter
Manhattan sidewalk.
.
Will I see you in
September?



Caroline Shank
1.25.22

prowles through my geography.
He is imperious in his flat paws
and dark, voluminous gaze.

His prowl, never the same, twice
around me. Learning the veins
and arteries of memory.  He
walks the rope of yesterday.

Black and sleek, he sways,
the tension oblique in it's
slant towards the cage bars.

I hear his rumbling response .  
He shaves the vowels of his
experience.  Glares like

tomorrow the world will end
With the slap of his jaw.
fhe end of the bars

never meant anything.  He
lumbers into my waiting gaze.

I feel the cold cold stare
of night falling on me.
He smiles in satisfaction,
paces again through my
tears.



Caroline Shank
January 14, 2022

Once I told you not to explicate my life
like this.   Don't tear me apart as when
the grass grows too high.  You mow me
and I am cut to my bleeding bones.

I receive your blades into my sanctuary
of flesh.  A little more of me to spill out
and I run.  There is a bottle of gin
waiting.  I forgot it very well when
you left me.

I don't want to be your friend.  I don't
want to wash in the same cracked sink
as you do.  Wear me on your last

trouser pocket, the blue one from
the New York tailor we could not
afford.  The abortion remains
too fragile to be spoken of.

The crackling of the shutting
door is all I can hear.    


Caroline Shank
January 12, 2015

Your moods are to me as is Mars
in ununderstanding.
You call and I am ready.
You bring the day's strata
of news.  There are layers
to us.  I do the moods as
an animal does clover in
a field unexpected.

I remain here
waiting,
Evergreen and u


Anonymously
I remain…



Caroline Shank
04.15.2l

It's a quarter past midnight.
Begin, here, the dirge.  
The promises of love
are missing.

We danced.
A long time ago
The shuffle, the
slow, rub,
lingers.

I did not reach out
thru the abyss,
to you
on the other side.

I grow old with
briars and cattails.
The winds scream and
the last song fractures the

heart of me.


Caroline Shank
12.31.21

The get together, the
conversation like snowflakes
melts to gin. The baubles
in the cake discarded.
Laughter, like a drunken
fruitcake, soaks in 🎭 ***.

We leave our coats behind.
The owner looks on in enebriated
unbelief and goes  to bed.

It is cold and Christmas contents
scatter behind backyard bushes.
We fall on the ice to gales of
hiccup and yelps of pain.

Our outdated traditions look
out on faces, missed at the party,
***** of belongingness.

Someone said that Christ is the
reason, but the customary
exchange gleaned
in moments, is glaringly
missed and the broken
heart turns over.
The sad neglect
which is mother of
this sadness, is seen
by the enebriate a tribute
to those who laugh.
  

Caroline Shank

To live one minute the breathless
expectancy of life
on the brink of a world whirling
at you with joyous awareness,
is to know that every sunrise calls
the Imam to prayer,

and in you the the consent of
life, the Summer response,
that breathless gasp .  


Caroline Shank.  
12./15/21


Caroline Shank.  
12./15/21

I Found God

I found God in a Baptist Church
in Milwaukee.
Faith,  small hands and
scratched bibles.

Warm cookies.

The delicate and the children.
Their names in coded
words on the skin under

my arms. .

Dedicate: the
day to the great E. Perience.

There is a new Age
coming.

I smoke a cigarette.

God arrived in fancy clothes.

Women dressed, frown.
Still voices in the

Wilderness

Witness the Beloved
baptism of perfumed
sinners

I smoked for them all.
My fee for being previously

Apostate.


Caroline Shank

There was a man come wandering
by with silver heels and loudly.
It was a Sunday and he asked me
to dance.  We tangoed through
close and warm.

Then it was a Wednesday warm
to touch you and I did.
You ran in the rain like a cat.
I called but the dull thud of
my tears fell only alone.

There love stretched
taut to crumble. And the heat
of my life felt the scald and
stars were unseen..

Light hid in drains and
you were in the rain gone.
I see you wet and reach
toward me. Dreams don't

die and I wrap the night
In paper sliced so thin

you can see thru my veins
where I have travelled

And alone.


Caroline Shank

I search for
rooms
that are lighted.  
That belong to
mornings.

I have beacons.
I search all the time.

On a
pebbly day.  My feet
run away with
the thought of
tomorrow .

I travel crests
of waves. In storms
I have stones for toes.

I am salvage of an unused
life.  Minutes,
hours, seconds left over

from the lover you
were ...

I run through
cold and
hard
gull screaming thoughts

of city lights and smoky
bars and poetry

unwritten.

Caroline Shank

I go where you go.  
I am  in your pores.

I am woven into the  curls
of your red hair.  I push memories
daily through your substantial
mind.

You are host to all the

years of our exile.  I am the
itch you wake to in the
long night.

I will be with you and
when you make love to
your wife I will be beside you.
It will be the secret you can
never tell.

We are the dreams in which
we play when night comes

and the cigarette smoke twins
memory forms, ephemeral
as the love which wraps the past
into the omnipresent

We.


Caroline Shank
12.3.21

They won't come back to me,
The dreams.
Fine lines of memory.

I dreamt of you recently.  I
kissed you,  I don't know
where we were but the taste of
you mouth took me
away to the beach of
winds.  The
warm sand.
Soft summer skin.

I lay over sleep  like
a coat
I hide in memories.

Return to me.
The night stretches
and reaches
for you.

I wait again, me,
holding onto the ashes of
love.  


The
night elongates,
that song.
We danced.

I dream of you and the
past lives again. Lights
silver me.  For the time you
hold me I SURRENDER.

Softly.
I walk in your footsteps..

Still.

The detritus of sleep  

remain scattered.

Caroline Shank
November 29 2021yy





They won't come back to me,
The dreams. They curl.
Fine lines of memory.

I dreamt of you recently.  I
kissed you,  I don't know
where we were but the taste of
your flavored mouth took me
away to the beach of
winds and seagulls.  The
warm sand. Your
soft summer skin.

I lay over sleep  like
a coat
I hide in memories.

Return to me.
The night stretches
and reaches
for you.

I wait again, me,
holding onto the ashes of
love.  Burnt.

The reels of
night elongate,
That song.
We danced.

I dream of you and the
past lives again. Bright lights
silver me.  For the time you
hold me I surrender utterly.

Yellow burns. Softly.
I walk in your footsteps..

Still.

The detritus of sleep  

remain scattered.


Caroline Shank




…

With all your expert mouth and
tongue of many tribes you
call me to the dance floor
of your poetry.

I ear your accent, I tongue the
vowels of your incredible name

which blossoms every morning.
I bed to your brown eyes when
touch begs rest from incessant
breathing.

You are wheat chaff and I am
the wind which blows over the dead dreams of aged memory.

I understand now the satiety
of your love.  The desert of
uncertainty where the bridge
of your wanderings
crossed my month
of ecstasy.

You are the list I take to
mind's far places when
thoughts of you are

exhausted.


Caroline Shank

Have I told you about
the Summer of 74, my
steamy discontent?
The suicide that fell
from the dusk of your
goodbye?

There I was, crumbling,
like someone crying
in the empty midnight.
Erased of sound, i
waited, with a sorry
silent cry.

I forget my next thought,
these aged dry days
but never those early
yellow evenings,

Moments float like a
remembered kiss into
a filled mouth.
We breathed
into each other, wanting
always promising.
I keep them in the
Chinese box. Your
souvenir of an
abandoned July.

The soft song lasting
in amber grained wood.  

Your words there
on my kissed lips.

The perennial intimacy
in the upstairs room you
slept in.

Now the warm night's tango
slides like lotion down
my tanned thighs.

This dance is forever.


Caroline Shank

Have I told you about
the Summer of 74, my
steamy discontent?

There I was, waiting,
like someone waiting.
An empty dance card.
So to speak.

I forget my next thought,
but never those yellow
evenings,

Moments float into a
filled mouth we breathe
into each other, wanting
always waiting.
I keep them in the Chinese box.
Your souvenir of an abandoned
July.

The sweet soft

song lasting in amber grained
wood.  

Your words on my kissed lips.

The perennial intimacy
in the upstairs room you
slept in.

Now the warm night's tango
slides like lotion down
my tanned thighs.

This dance is always,
forever.

Caroline Shank

The substance of our
relationship is the accident
and the spin of
time and the whirl
of this existence is
in the potency.

You are because I am. These
blue eyes are the essence.
The substance of an early birth
in a long tunnel.  Truth erased
by a minute's pleasure.

This poem is a radical
moment. Time stretched to
the limit of potency.
We are or are not determined
by the body and soul of
our essence.  Whether we
exist or not is in the
form of the attention we
each bring into this…

Time together is the soul's
determination.  We can only
form the intention.

Intention without form is
matter without you.

Caroline Shank

Without a Kiss




Without a kiss hello or a wave
goodbye he travels the streets
and cinder paths.  He walks
beside her and never sees
her stained feet and
bleeding.

Tonight the sky is dark,
the crunch of autumn
leaves softened by the
rain of this afternoon
and the last bugs of
night, sings and the
quiet footfalls
remind her of another
lover.  The quiet sigh
from you throws a pain
around her shawl clad
shoulders.

No it made no difference
finally and with her tears
she scrubbed your name
from the temple where
it had been carefully
drawn.

It is said, somewhere, that
the long walk on wet street's
leaves leave only the faint odor

of my cologne.


Caroline Shank

You will never forget that first brush
of love.  The earnest breeze of a fresh
today, as if now were magic and
breathing was beyond explanation.

After which the future cannot  
draw from you the stream of
that song, the bell of a long moan.
For the days stretch on catlike
and clawing.  You understand that
this was the beginning of the
end of peace. A rip in the
fabric of time.

You will never forget the sound
called out by tomorrow that
never takes tomorrow under
consideration.  

To love infinitely is a lesson
beyond youth or midlife's
precarious adventure.  It is
the last bite of all experience,
the quintessential notes
of poetry.

Love itself escapes all the
ink fallen in the glass.
You are writing a
diary no one will
ever read.

The red hair of yesterday
changed into dusk and the
sun sets in perpetuity.

Caroline Shank

You are no one in particular. If I saw you on the city's streets I would
pass you by as the wind scrufs
the fallen leaves on the
***** sidewalk.  
I would not know you
as you were,
a soldier and a king.

You have forgotten promises
and faith.  Life is a sad thing
when the little mention in
the paper has only the
inelegant childhood phrase:
Dominus vobiscum.

People will say How Odd
she was and round in her
years of silence.

Someone will wonder if
I were ever loved and if I
danced in the
dim light of the red room,
with a slot machine and
not much else but the
music and the breath
between us.


Caroline Shank

If you kiss me now our eyes
will close and we will
push against each other
like fruit vying for the light,

In the nightpain of loving
our eyes will slowly open
and your face will wilt
until its cheeks and crevices
dim under the sad symmetry of
our public lives.

If you kiss me now I will forget
the grown repair of skirt alone
in the loud sound of memory
as it slips ever so gently away.


Caroline Shank

If anyone asks you I am old
and out of shape.  My legs
curl under me when I stand.
There is a whoosh in my ear
from the fall the other night.

My face of many colors
goes before me like an
electric light.  

I wobble on shifted
ground.  No longer young
I am a cramp in the leg
of time.  

My children go before me and
I watch and I wait.  They are
middle aged and turn to their
own concerns.  

I remain ununderstood not
that I was, clearly, ever taken
for the woman I was.  

If anyone asks tell them
I understood the song
of madness,

and I wait for
the end
of reason.


Caroline Shank

Everything reminds me of that short
summer.  The clouds form in ancient swirls of fine candy.  Stick candy.
The Wisconsin breath on my
neglected face still summons the
memory.

Proust has already penned his memoir.

I have as yet been unmined.
You remain like an effigy
on the razor edge of sanity.

I feel the hot hand of our past
rub along the night we
loved and smoked and
loved some more.

The days we were loosed on
the city we held the yellow
breath of anticipation.  

We walked

into night when the dark
fallen Angel laid her hand
on times cruel cudgel
and struck us apart.

The music I hear is the
remaining notes of a still dark
lift of dance.

The touch of you is a reply
in only every breeze.

Caroline Shank

I don't want you to find me
in these later years.  I can't
cry anymore when I think
of you.

We were young in the music
of our age.  We danced (so
closely) to "Me and Mrs Jones"
The top room of the familiar
bar where we were all alone
except for one couple playing
pinball.

I'm broken finally. The white
hair, the pounds padding me
like Bart on the field.
I'm broken in my heart, the
one place you only have touched.

I am broken in the days and
nights.  The flesh colored
clouds slide over us
as it did so long ago.  
I can't sing even
to the  songs we loved
as each one of us moved in the
roiling grass.  Shattered, I
am veined with the silver of old mirrors.

Stopping by the road in the
summer rain I sigh the
loss of many things.  Things
chipped now and cracked.
My face falls, like shards of
failed glass.  I
cry out for you.

Words are frail bones.
I fail to reach them although
they stain my  
breaking heart.

As my husband slips in
the mire of Parkinson's,
he will not know me
very soon.

I write about you with
capricious longing. The
touch you gave  of
seeing me home.
The Marijuana was not
that strong.  

Don't cry for me
Alabama. I am
here where you
left me.




Caroline Shank
September 15, 2021


This is a new poem I am trying
to know.  A broken memory
that slides up and down
the heart of me.