I write to know that I'm
alive.  Someone else said
that. I just can't remember
who.  I write the vowels
and consonants of the
swirls of my own life.

I remember in the first place
the keys that opened the
doors of wonder.  Not always
a good thing I can assure you.
Growing up was filled noise.

Secondly I remember the
troubles.  Years of pale white
when I witnessed my mother's
bitterness, my father's
kindness, the worldmakers
of our youth.

Number three taught me
to breathe in the screams
of my mother's midnight
rantings. This is when I
taught myself to smoke. The
cancer of her determination
was to ruin us all.

I stopped counting.  My life
after girlhood, cowl
of stillborn years, trod the
boards of marriage and
babies.  

You were the pages without
names.  Months of writing
torn from a book and
saved.  Can you find me
like a lonely letter?

I write to remind you of the
vellum we shared, so briefly,
to which this lonely passage
belongs.

Find me.

Caroline Shank

I wait for the blue hour.
The time to open the story
into the dusk of
regret.

I am ready to read and
lose myself.  Blue touches
black.

I’m a hungry type of person.
I hang my coat on the tree
and walk into the kitchen

The same kitchen where you
used to drink coffee with me.
The same green walls with
yellow flowered wallpaper.  
Do you remember?

No?  You were
always looking at me as if
I were the only character in
your book.  You knew you
were my whole library.  I
could cover you with
my crying eyes and
you would be there,
in my world, forever.

Marry me
you said but I was
married.  You charged
into the tomb of night.

And I cannot lose
the exquisite pain of
those final pages?

  
Caroline Shank

I am the mother of my

youth.  I cry in places 

no one knows. 


It was the sunline to

Alabama that made

all the difference. 


I closed the 70's with

a bang. 


Today 

I enter this

decade mute.


My white hair falls

to the floor, my bent

back bent by the years.


I knew it would

end like this: 


alone,


by the tree. 



Caroline Shank

1.1.20

There is no world without
you in it.  The climb up times
ladder
is empty of rungs.

There is fire in my mind.
There are clinging bones,
clogs
Of dislocation.  Tomorrow
rests on the slippery south
of today.

If you deliquesce there where
you daysay
I may slip on what remains.

The rest is not my business.
I have two worlds
to choose from
on a bare basis of
belief.

There is no sense to science.
Blow up the universe
to your expectation of ruin
and

I never knew my own
legend.


Caroline Shank
10.22.2024

Sometimes she is so tired
she can feel the trees grow.
The slow wind on the bark
draws infinite sighs.

Her breath is elongated along
the wood's facade from morning
until night.  She looks toward the
future with her eyes forever
drawn, wistful and cased with
time's awful drudge.

It is not about the wind she
thinks, but the weary sound of
silence until you return.

The circadian rhythm of life
will resume after the war.
Along the hours granted
in your reunion, she will move
with cellular efficiency.  

Time will beat soon,
please God,
in sinus predictability .



Caroline Shank

It was not important, what you said.
It was not really the end of life
when you were leaving.  You took
all  sound with you.  But the rain.

Drenched and bone cold I
called you.

You hid in the tall bushes.  Tied as
you were to my voice you still
broke free. I was untethered
and alone.  I cried
as I left you in the dark.

You are silence leashed to my
last memory.  I was untried and
I lost.

I breathed your air.  You inhaled
me.  I told you I wouldn't hurt you.
But I killed the first fragile filaments
of touch, of kiss.  You folded like
a cloth in the night.  I ran to God
who didn't want me.

I have written poems with
the ink of time's pallette.
Colors I remember.  Did you
cry that night you left me in the
rain?  I died for three days.

You can find me, if you look,
behind time's trickster.

You don't like heartbreak poems.
I know this much.  Your impatience
defies reality.  I melt the ink
with which you scoff.  I am
not heartbroken.

I am become death.

I linger alone.

Caroline Shank

Good morning Sunshine, roll over me
in that special way.  Bring out the
juice that warms me.  I see your clear
heat.  You are not invisible to me.

Roll over me Sunshine.
I wait on the day.  Gray days
you hide.  I know.  You are
Tantalus to my Sophia.  I call

you out of hiding to run your
fingers over my skin call
cry to be love touched.

Good morning sunshine. I
wait for your song.  Rub on
my skin.  I am open
and I hold hot hands with
the summer winds.

I am mellowed by your touch.

Caroline Shank

Sunshine on bare ground.  Acorns
fall off live oaks.  The shade
creeps where last year flowers
grew.  The planet is off its axis
and I am alone.

No language leaves splats where
before the sunlight shone in a
poem of great beauty.
Tears now nurture time's
becoming.

Trust the only thing that has been
ever true.  Goodbye has many
leaves.   It yields stones among
the twigs, fruit that is puny
and wee.


Caroline Shank

My books live on oak shelves.  They
inhabit my home. Persons of
importance stain the pages.  I take
them into my mind.
I polish even the dust.

Books have worlds waiting
always ready to unfold.
I take princes and romantic
scoundrels, heroes and villains
away to my chair.

I have a green old recliner in
the corner where books find
me. Wanting my lap.

They know the substance and
accident of my self belongs to
them.  Books are like me.
I am a mistake except
here where my books take
me to magic, to the beginning.

Ragged and torn I polish
the furniture of ink
and paper of a thousand
years or more.  

Books are the cause and
effect of my being.

I navigate the act of
reading on my green
ship.  

It is a potent
place.

Caroline Shank

Tomorrow creeps in its own
******* way to the last syllable
of recorded time.

It is this that worries me,
the notes i will write
around the corner..
Those metaphors that

wait

for me when love is
not there.

There are witches too
and chants.

Walk with me into the
copse

Save me my love.

Caroline Shank
11.20.2024

When I die I will not notice
you by the book in the room
where my ashes lie.  You
never took up space in my
life as I lived it, for you.

When I die I will not see
you not weeping for me
as you stand by the shelf
that has my name written
on it, too soon.

I will lie over you, invisible,
a scatter of memories
you won't recall.  You
left me to live without the
musk of your once,
love.

I will whisp around your
beating heart. You will realize
me in a moment.

You reach out for me,
the air, the stillness, the
forlorn echo of a
memory.



Caroline Shank

Is there shelter from this storm?
The neurons rage at the
light that seeps through the
cracks, waiting for the prayer
to form from forgotten words.

The days are short, no more
gaps form between the two
waves of memory.  Gone
on some mornings is the
memory of the time before
the syllables of experience
faded into time.

There are many ways to make
a life over when the buoys
and markers are lost.

I will find you inside
your days and I will hone
your experience into
days you will not miss
and I will cry alone.

Caroline Shank

They blamed me too but

they would not say so. The end came startlingly quick.  Though 

it took your whole life to get there.


Not me. You.  I only followed

that slate path up to almost.

This is out of order Judy.

You took the pills out of the

white slide-out box.  I 

remember that part.


They blamed you too, didn't

they?  Did you miss out on the

hospital, the doctors, the oh

such a bad headache?


Your kids grew up without

you.  Frustration fingered

them.  They came to know 

the Magic, the Myth.


Pace Requiescat Judy,

over the rainbow, 

we all go somewhere.




Caroline Shank




The movie "Judy" starring

Renee Zellweger

I fumble with the days now,

humbly wonder the date, 

the time. Not you.  

You move with the 

alacrity of your age.  


I wrote on the

calendar when you were

babies.  I lost you

at six. Freud said so.


The chipped diaper pin 

that I still have.  The tape

of your first words I can no

longer play.  

Your rumpled memories, 

tumbled recollections.


I traipsed through 

the days of your 

childhoods, 

slowly moved

around the nights.  


Take me gently

through your lives.  


I am alone.


I nap everyday and wake

earlier than I would like to.


Go slowly

around my life.


I have seen my own

star streak 

and I am not 


afraid.



Caroline Shank

There is  something in the
air that moves me forward
always off balance, as a
thought glances by me and
is quickly forgotten.  

There is a law someone
never told me.
When I was younger I lived
unbothered by the whims
and movements of change.  
Now I cling, precariously,
to a life untethered.

I see my lorn form
change in the whisp
of a moment.

Regardez moi,
je pleure



Caroline Shank

Renaissance man.
You are the face of God,
of breathing. You move
currents in
our direction.  

I offer you the flower
of my country.  A flourish
saved for a hero. Be my
Cavalier.  Move
true to our time.

Renaissance man
history will move
us together if only
for the length
of a petal.

Caroline Shan

I have rebuilt so many times. Every
love is a dispair.  I have room for
none but the lonely, the broken
pedestrians of time's sidewalks.

How old I am is irrelevant.  I
am tuned to the rhyming night.
I listen to the frogs mating in the
swamp, the crickets and, in
season, the cicadas who do not
love but for a breath.  

My house is now a ramshackle
of old memories, songs that
burn my fragile skin, and the
sloe gin of my youth.

You retain me, and in the end,
the currency of my life
is writ of you.

I have rebuilt so many times,
love's fires ring the sidewalk
around my memory .
I write of the past that
is in runes.  My thoughts enact
in me that youth that was always
yours to have and to hold.

We are all phantoms of our pasts.
We are rubbed with it. For you
my skin sings of the tight tan
you knew

once upon a time.

Caroline Shank

the Queen and the Prince
married in splendor regaled,
the long autumn begins.

Dark Matter


What if love itself were a dark
hole?  Love is blind is
a metaphor for the unloved
to concentrate on.

The lucky rabbit’s foot that
saved creation.

Birth and Rebirth

into the density
where we who love each
other

do things in which dream’s
direct the play.

There is no escape from
the known only world in
whose pulses we frolic.

Tomorrow is.
random.
beats

in a soundless
Universe.

Only to have
reality served

cold.

Caroline Shank
10.23.2024

If I Could I Would

go back to my genetic ancestry,

swim unmussed by personality

in a rain filled quarry.  A

clean shell in a pocked

landscape, prior to pain,

prior to, God knows, love

knows me.


recline in the primordial ooze.

one cell, untransmittable.

Unable to become, anything.


leave, God, this one small

organism guiltless of begetting

just this one girl in the

frozen forests of the human

future.

The Image of the Old Lady


The image of the old lady
in the saggy coat walking down
the beach won't leave me.

I see her grey haired bun
hovering over the collar
of her tattered coat. The
sand splits in her footsteps.

The gulls holler and swoop.
She doesn't notice.
She thinks he will return
to her here on the sand
where they first made love

forty years ago.  She sees
his red hair coated with sand.
Her tan hands sketch his face
forever in her memory.

She walks with a slow lope,
her brown stockings in
disarray, shoes filled up
with the miles she
travelled in those years
of her husband and kids.

This is her time alone to
pray to God to love him
her love.

Caroline Shank

I saw Sammy one

warm Spring day basking in the

sunshine of my life.


Plop, he jumped as I

sat watching him swim toward

me.  I was hooked.


Spring is a water.

lily shading a guppy.

I felt the shimmer


engulf me that day.

Love was floating by as

I waited for it.



Caroline Shank

February in Milwaukee is a quiet time.
Waiting for Spring and trying to lose
weight for the usually beautiful
midwestern summer.

Shots ring out.  The brewery is a
Crime Scene.   Snow falling on
police.  People are dead.  The
shooter too.  No more information yet.

It's a cold Wednesday.  School
children are hustled away.  Hours
in lockdown.  The press scurry
like beetles.  Flashing lights are
blinking like scared eyes in the
crowd.

Over and over the sounds of
chaos are quieted.  Clouds fall
steam and noiseless tears
as people are released to
go home.  A TV reporter
asks banal questions of
survivors.

The brewery goes on melting
hops and grains.  Mash is
safe at least as Milwaukee
bars stock Miller beer to
complete the conversation.


Caroline Shank
2.26.20

Forty five years gone by and still
the dust motes
fly from the philosophy you casually
taught her.   She paid attention and now
the syllables of Truth are battered
and worn. Your truth Ben.  You were
her  wheel steering corners of her mind
onto streets of pure reason.

She sat in jeans and tee shirt,
wrote vessels of your words
and swatted her feelings around
your black hair.  She could not
get enough of the meal and
wealth of your knowledge.

All that is left is you
crying into the phone that
you might lose her.
She who was so new
and young.

You left a message, cold
as ice.  You were gone
and she was never to
understand
your soggy
remarks.  The risk was
like magma, you never
came too close again.

You taught her truth
and slammed her
against the wall of
your ambivalence.


Caroline Shank