Bard of my reading, no less
the trail to my heart's desire.
Singing in the crevices of
memory I love you.

Ode to the bark and green
you awaken the song.
Sing to me in the spaces
between rhyme and
desire.

I wait to hold the source
of song, the poem of
you driven to the page
to lap the signs of
tomorrow like evanescent
cotton when spilled in
the wind of your
imagination.

Tomorrow the nascent verse
will spill like water on flowers.
Grow to the top dear Poet,
ride the board of memories

which sing in the lines of
your experience.

Teach me, Sweet Jesus, to
Sing.

Caroline Shank
1.15.2023

My life, then, hung like a
sun-yellow mobile that spun
in the heat as I flowed from
one end of summer to the other.
The songs on the radio were
my island.  My life as a girl
in the years before fences
appears in memory slides,
dressed in the beaches of my
youth.

I grew from seeds to roses in
the ground of my childhood
summers.  In the calendar of
my life as a young girl
every date prefigured you.
Day by day, in the years of
growing I bought, with the
barter of my soul, all the
heat and all the music.

Battened by the times before
you, strengthened by long
storms, hot suns, cold winds,
this, then is what I offer
you:  deep beaches, thornworn
roses, summers that flow
from one end of your life
to the other.

It's getting dark early again. The
street lamps are on by dinner.
Soon the memory of piles of
leaves, the smell of Fall and
the call to jump in the whispering

auburn heaps of my youth
would jolt me.

I am old now and fat.  The
ritual of Autumn's call to
the dark evenings that were
an invitation to the holidays,
is a calling cocktail.

The rains drained the ashes
into the sidewalk gutters.  The
hopscotch grid fades as day
light melts and I lose the
game.

Games are like drifts of scents
across the light post's shadow.
They are the ephemeral
recipes of my New York
youth. I walk to the edges
of the grass reading the
folded paper fortunes that

told me I would marry Jack
someday. I didn't. I threw
the lined prediction in the
leaves, scuffed my brown
shoes on the sidewalk

never dreaming that real
life would crinkle like the
ruled paper forgeries.



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

"Everyone goes away in the end"
Cash sings, his anthem to the
times he left behind.

When, if, in the event I have not
returned, the song will still
sound the name of our child.
Life will spread the remains
of our faded experience.  

Return to the signposts, those
arrows who should have
run while the music was in love.

There was smoke in the air
Hernando.

Poems are

steps

along the edge.


Caroline Shank
8.29.2022

I've started walking with a cane.
I'm like an old broken soldier.
Under the sofa are parts that do
not fit in rusty sockets.  New
loops and strings cannot

put
me
together.

I missed muster again and
got the letter.

I am
not required
at table

any more.

I spend my days twirling parts
left over from first rounds.
My springs boing hollow
and I don't
see well at night.

What will happen
to
me
now
that I have
seen the moment
of my greatness
flicker?

(I can still
quote Eliot.)

I want you more to
more than move me,
you starting my gears
and I overflow with

Purpose.

Your attention goes
and
I

no longer

see my any
self
at all.


Caroline Shank
2.07.2023

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

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

My husband would have
told you I was

loud.

He
died then and through my
silence

I mourn the sounds of
his breathing.

I listened to the clouds
whispering
The trees swimming
sounds through my

tears

I scream in my brains
lobular desertion of

reality.

The end of my thoughts...

of

yesterday..

There is no reason
to explain the

desertion

of a life unaware,

of my silence that

now screams for the
end of my tears.

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

Today is a mistake, an aberancy
of time. The facts please.

No.

There are no facts when you
love someone.

The day, like a Harlequin novel
opens. The goblet in her hand
falls, the flowers can't catch up.

Think of spilling love like
milk.
You can never save
the white oil slick spreading.

Tomorrow will never come,
There will be only 15 minutes
of night.  

Memories
crawling into daylight

unexpected,

Finally,

constellations
slide across the sky.

The final ending:

“ your appointment with (sorrow) death
was always to be

here.”

Caroline Shank
6.13.2024


Agatha Christe

To whom shall I say
I love you
If not to you?

To my bent head
I close my mind
to paths windings,

And the sun’s bright
light steals the dark
secret of you.

To the nights signature
you lie with me.
I wrap my dreams
as hidden

in the shelf of my
breast.

Not to know this
is my gift to you.

The place upon, where
you
rest is the worn
In me the tragic

song.


Caroline Shank
03.17.2024

revision April 27 2001

Recrudescence

(Recrudesce: to break out
again after lying latent or relatively inactive)

My friend,

There are doors which even you and I
have never opened. Shut for so many
years I am slammed back against
the sink of meditation.

Drawers unopened, their loneliness
stuck shut, slipped behind hinges.
Whole cabinets of dust. I wore many
selves. Stains hang here so far
removed from conversation
as to be little calciums. Calculi.
I rattle with little bones.

But since you ask….


Viz.:

When the gun was pressed against
my head I sat more still than a
fig on a summer tree, more breathless
than a whisper, more quiet than the
center of that fruit, It’s stem
my hair, I felt it's roots
take. I was sixteen.

I always wondered if the red dye
of my fear rubbed off on him.
He was silent, his face the only light
in the room, the phosphorescence of
madness. He couldn't find
me I guess, inside my aubergine
stillness.

He was a steel shaft in
his hand. At last he slipped
to the door.

In the end, unbreathing,
I saved him.

Ego te absolvo.

I was so afraid he wouldn't
like me anymore.

It's not the fault of the stars,
literature or my mother,
The vague statues
The crenelatted fringes
Of half remembered
conversation that rest
in my imagination .

I look for, in you,
the long shadows of
memory scrolled on
the sands of literature

This
poem,

These choices,
       unfold.

         Love

recapitulates.


Caroline. Shank
10.28.2023

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

Summer Night

It's a quarter after six, on an August
evening of my 76th year.   I drink
a sherry.   Here,  my feet
are free of the socks I insist on
wearing,  I am smoking.

The entertainment
for tonight is planning tomorrow.

Tomorrow is the last mention of
Summer.

You took me into custody, left
my life's belongings behind.
Sans identification,  sans valuables,
sans feeling.

Now there is only the zeitgeist of
this age.   The long lobes of wise men
and the sagging ******* of yesterday.
I write in cursive so you will have
to talk to me.  

I am the last syllable of my family.
The seventies remain as a bastion
of understanding.  Do not blame

me for remembering you.

I have forgotten many things but not the warm Summer night.   It creeps over me like your

hand.


Caroline Shank
8.15.2022

I am fickle.  Let's face it.
I dated a lot of guys. I was
the girl in the red sweater.
Me and my saddle shoes.
I only wore Buster Brown
socks.

Look at me now. I am awash
In pink and sometimes yellow.
I don't like red and I don't like you!

Yesterday when we got married.
No 50 years ago.  Was it really
that long?  We pledged to love
Forever.  Now Forever is a
painful scar.  You were never
remotely interesting.

"so how did you like the play
Mrs. Lincoln?"

You say I can move on but
there is no place to go behind
the purple curtain.

Is this poem finished?
It would seem

that it is.  I will take

my bows, shed the
years and put the
memories in the

cardboard shoebox with
the painted scenery,

(please forgive the
Feminine endings.)

close the door and
see

my next adventure
coming for me.

I get pills

in the night.

I am in
San Francisco

to see Ginsberg.

I dream of
poetry and sand,
swimming
naked in cold clear
water…

and I sing in
my
sleep.


Caroline Shank

It ain't gonna happen
no more

Ain't gonna be no kissin'
No nor maple tree.

Tomorrow ain't gonna

tell my story
'cause I ain't gonna
see no love'n

Cause you gone and
died away from

me.

There is a favor I called
in, a moment before

you died and the glass
covered your eyes.

I am not singing in the
Chorus.  The Angel's
practice better and

the music calls

your sacred singing
Baritone

No More


Caroline Shank
12.14.23

You are lost to the waking world, a
denizen of the darkness.  I pry my
fingers from off the steel lock.  You
risk the deeping years, the early

yellow springing world laid for you
from my body.  I talked to you in the
corridor of my youth. You only tried
me for.a moment. You took the
pages of my determination and
threw them over the brick lined
walls of your selfness.

You made me witness your dance.
The song you sang, your lyrics
beneath my pillow, the
voice of ancestors not heard until
your music escaped the fences.

My mother did not live to dance
with you.  The songcoated signal
escaped between  your
incomprehensible affinity.

The dance of genetics in full
display.  I am still the Baffled.
The one footed dance  of
the broken, the chondral song
played every evening.

Go behind the schoolyard where
you and the lions of your
collective urges vye to be
the fitest ****** on the block.

My life is short now with my own
kicked addictions. I drowned in
the lake of desire. I have swum
the frigid surf and walked away.

You are not unique. Many sear
the letter of desire across their
bare forhead and cannot traverse
the concourse of the day.  

I will not declare myself aroung
your wheel. I walk through Grace.
If you choose me kneel for the
Benediction of God.

Caroline Shank
5.28.22

I Prayed that I would love
someone
again in this lifetime.

That he would
recognize
me in my selfness
and be glad.

Glad as primitively as a
single
glimpse
regales the saddest

crying echo of my
name morphing into
Song.

Have I found that
ecstatic moment?
Have you in the
moment's recognition
sung with me

tonight?

No The End is not my
Beginning. It is the

World

Which breathed our
names

Together



Caroline Shank
11.19.23

(Recrudesce: to break out
again after lying latent or relatively inactive)

My friend,

There are doors which even you and I
have never opened. Shut for so many
years I am slammed back against
the sink of meditation.

Drawers unopened, their loneliness
stuck shut, slipped behind hinges.
Whole cabinets of dust. I wore many
selves. Stains hang here so far
removed from conversation
as to be little calciums. Calculi.
I rattle with little bones.

But since you ask….


Viz.:

When the gun was pressed against
my head I sat more still than a
fig on a summer tree, more breathless
than a whisper, more quiet than the
center of that fruit, It’s stem
my hair, I felt it's roots
take. I was sixteen.

I always wondered if the red dye
of my fear rubbed off on him.
He was silent, his face the only light
in the room, the phosphorescence of
madness. He couldn't find
me I guess, inside my aubergine
stillness.

He was a steel shaft in
his hand. At last he slipped
to the door.

In the end, unbreathing,
I saved him.

Ego te absolvo.

I was so afraid he wouldn't
like me anymore.

When civilizations die there is always
fire falling into the hearts of the
population.   Love is lost and minds
are numbed to the cries of politicians.
The ground shakes and generatïons
fall.  The loud music plays.  The dancing
never stops.

Poets are unheard amidst the bad
grammar and mushrooms of those
who have forgotten or lost the keys
to the kingdom.

The brightest lights are dimmed under the
laughter of ignorance.  It happens
in public places and private living
rooms.  Tomorrow the plates will
shake and coffee will spill in South
America and Norway.  Ubiquitous
on air personalities encourage
the madness.  

The drug of choice is television..
We watch the mardi gras
and swallow gin like
coffee to hail
the sounds of silence.

No one will hear the siren
of danger, or the whisper of
loss.  We fade
with a

whimper.

Caroline Shank

There is fire in the sky, the
green mountain frames a
landscape of contradiction.

Alert now, here there, birds
must fly behind the hot winds.
The sounds abound over the
landscape.  It was 4:00 of a
June afternoon. You called

to stop my journey. The  warmth
of a June afternoon lay like silt
on the place where we made love
only yesterday.

Goodbye to the birds and beasts
who sadly left home for the
last time.

I will remember the heat, the
touch, and the memory of
before ever you touched

my hair.

Caroline Shank
1.23.2023

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

To be without a reason
to be.

To be a worn inside out
kind of being.  To miss you mostly
your absence, like
falling water,

puddles.

You make the tears
want to fall.  You slant from the
pictures .
Grant me Oh Lord a minute.

I am trimmed in half.  Your
consecrated remains on
the bookshelf.

Tomorrow is the Blessing
that holds the map of
living without you.

You walked in the Garden.
You never said that kissing
was underrated.  It's how

you left in your bed in a
May afternoon.  The
last time to say I loved

you turned away.  Was
life with me so hard?

You ran to God to save
your demented soul.

I watched from my window
As

you

Flew away.


Caroline Shank
6.24.2023

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

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 know some things. I know that
entropy is unusable. I know that
hot is fast spinning molecules.

That my love is true to my
heart.  We spin together.
We look into a Heaven of
swirls.  Light captured between
us is always in motion.

We, Tango dance through the
eons.

No this is not a good poem.
This is what I mean:

You are the half of everything
I am, the play’s denouement
My song’s tune.

Tomorrow will always be
today, love will always
wrap the vowels dancing

between us.  We R.
There are many powers to us.

We spin.  Kisses on a white

Wing

Destiny is soft. We have lain
in love and thrive

forever.


Caroline Shank
9.4.2024

The first inspiration of Spring.
Sunshine patterns the snow
and it is almost March.  The
bird's song is returning and
I am glad to see the
days ignite the flowers under
the garden

paths.

Remove the cold
chill of snow.
The Winter winds blow
for only a while.  I am ready
to be toasted by jonquils
and tulips which reach me
under the tattered cover
of darkness.  The cold
nights bear witness to my
vigil and I wait for

you.

Be mine and I will be the
best of warm on your
red arms.  Dance me to the
heart of Summer.  
We will be the songs of
Midnight

together.

Take me into Summer like
two voices singing.
One note at

last.


Caroline Shank

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

What is happening to me is
Irrefutable loss. The end of
my days, the vestiges of
an unpaved life.

Without you I sank into the
mire.  The mundane years
show in a thick neck.  My
shoes are unpatched and
where the buckles were

are scars from the uncaring.

My neck reaches now to find
the last vestiges of my over
weight.

The lane I have walked on
has no line but a footfall
indentation of a size 8
shorn shoe.

No to the voices calling
you.  I wrap my scarf
around the memory,
young and death defying
important and the now
dreaded
journey for naught.

Caroline Shank
1.15 2023

REC

I miss skin that doesn't crinkle.
The kind the doesn't matter
what I'm wearing.

I miss beepers. The 7730 hello
page.  The calls from people
wanting to go out to eat.

I miss moving like the wind
blowing daisies and spoors
of dandelions

What about singing in the
snow you ask?
The farther my poor article
could reach in the total
silence of the winter.

Most of all i miss warm
saltwater swims in the
early mornings, coffee
strong with sweetener.

I miss.you kissing me
with the wayward wind
playing.

The sirroco of my life
began in a dream.

It will drift like
phosphorescence
unconfused with

Poetry


Caroline Shank
7.28.2023

" There are only four questions of value in life, Don Octavio.
What is sacred?
Of what is the spirit made?
What is worth living for,
and what is worth dying for?

The answer to each is the same:
only love."

From don Juan de Marco



Where are you now when songs
get blown and dance in the turf
of memory?  I find the ends of
everyday strings tie the knots
knitted from songs I've heard
and poems I've written.

Four questions are unanswered
Don Octavio.  I travel over years
undone or never to be.  My mind
unknits the warm nights, the chirp
of insects, the swarm so thick
we could not make love in the
dark, by the lake.

No answers swim into my mind.
No questions fall to the ground.
My gown remains laced.  You
touched me under the ties but
you left me in the rain, unanswered,
unable to return to the capsule
out of which time begat those
four questions.  

Look for the answers under the
salt of my tears and find only
smears.  My tears are no reply.




Caroline Shank

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

I will tell you why I am
so
loud.

So you would
notice me.

I am
cluttered with images.

Images that swirled
while I slept,

long and
chipped.

Your voice
rocked me to

sleep and in the
morning

I sang.



Caroline Shank
3.19.2024

The Winter Of Discontent!

I forgot
what blew the

winds  of another
Winter

coursing over me.
Tomorrow has eyes

on my child. The last
chance.  

Doomed
wind numbed the
underbed of all the

legends.  

Those it
could reach for a
quarter and some
salt.

I am happy

To know

you

I said to

God.

Goodbye


Caroline Shank
3.5.2024

I love your fierce approach. You swash
at me.  With strong arms you cut the air.
I feel the breeze of your determination.
You look like a soldier.  The art of love
is a frenzy of intensity. You can't take
me without a battle.  

I am the rose-holder, you are the steel
clad rider.  You joust to win my favor.
I throw petals to path your way to
me.  The minstrels play.  Sing amen
to this afternoon.

You have won the day! I am the
receiver of your presents.  Fifty years
have passed. My trodden soul is
bare. You rode the steed of truth
and beauty.  

It is my turn to write your name
in a church of sorrow.  To try to
climb down my lofty seat.  I kiss
you fairly my true warrior.  The
last joust was now.


Caroline Shank
5.26.22

Tomorrow the lights will go
Out
is all.

The bulb, a soft
corrosion in the end.
Only tomorrow will recur
A million light years,
over a future
unaccomplished.

The glow  is
Un normal.
Love Extinguished.

So u will have to be
Unloosed from the
alphabet. Ink in
space

dissolves.

The unrestrictions
of a love pledged
like Smoke and
Mirrors. The dusk
of
of Unknowing

spills.

The land of whispers,
of imagined Summer's

doesn't
exist.

Ever
.

Caroline Shank
7.25.24

Act 5; scene 3

You shuffled off your mortal coil
at the wrong **** time.
The  denouement Is not here yet.  
Your death left
footprints into ,Dunsinane with
your Lady,  Me.

We had plans and schemes.
We didn't finish the play.
Dunsinane was ours. Your
birthday of will.

The rescue was sold out.  You
we're a hit.  The Scottish play
was untroubled. Your crown
cleaned.  You stumbled into
the play's last act.

That I must go on alone out of this
creaking pasture, this mudhole,
to be traversed without you
is a remarkable lapse in your
Ordinary

My hands hurt for the rubbing
of them.  I am alive because
you aborted the play.

Return to me. I have paid
Dearly

for this ticket that was

meant for two.


Caroline Shank
5.10.2023

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

The Story

Hey Wall.
Are you there
to hold me up when
old age conquers tomorrow?

Between my layers,
are my flaws.

Not the Greek Islands
again, Wall.
Not where my last glass of
Summer wine
was drunk?

The tears slide
on my face.

The wine is finished
and in

your dusty corners
gathers moonlight.

I toast to you
Wall.  

Nothing ordinary
ever was
so still.


Caroline Shank
8.7.2022


The 1970's movie
Shirley Valentine

My thoughts morph into
the stuff of a Summer
afternoon:

A long time ago, before
I grew white tendrils of age in my hair, and that still lone Gardenia softened our song,  you played with me in the sand. We opened up hidden evenings and my only thought
was to be touched by you.

Your rough skin was pocked with Marijuana seeds and the twigs of collaboration.  Sky-high and pinked our conversation was in your cupped hands on my soft walls.

Is it any wonder
that I loved your song?

Now I am stuccoed and old and it is in my heart alone that this explication of a memory
remains alive
in the

crevasses.


Caroline Shank
6.10.21

My Daughter Finding Fossils
    Lake Michigan
    (Nine years old)



Early morning beached bones
and million-year-old rocks
whisper, “Little girl?”.
She stops.  The socks she
carries rattle full of rocks.
She hears the one she wants.

She calls, “Mommy, look!”.
She thinks the fossil has smiles
I can see.  Ah, I haven’t seen
fossil smiles since I was nine
and curly and cradling my own
socky bundle by the beach
of little mouths calling to
little girls of fossil dreams,
fossil futures, and stone-hard
fossil love.

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

I wonder if He can see you?
Is it all you believed?
Do you know now that
believing is the cracked

cement of your time
here.  It was not new.
Are the streets of gold
and are you walking in a
white gown?

Tomorrow I will write in your
journal of the Jabberwock.
You know him now, the painted
struts of glove and spats.
He tells me stories while your
world ends.

His bandersnatch is not
what you believed. Beware
the marble veins of his
indifference.  He says he will
En garde and you will fail.

You will, to the ground, bleed
in your reminisces, as he
walks into the water to wash
your lies with ***** soap.

Beware the stance of shaking
legs, the bleat of strangled sheep.
He cannot see you in your
personhood for he would
crumble into mad bad shoes
and slither away to your
last poet's rhyme.

Snicker Snack.


Caroline Shank
2.10.2023

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

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

She Wrote Again

She wrote again. I found her
letters, looking for the storm
of him.  The wind knocked
red hair, the black boots left
outside the door.  I read that

he left on a Sunday, walked
away without his trademark
whistle trailing Oh Shenandoah
behind him.  

The dim days followed.  She
asked everyone, where he was,
his blue eyes a DNA call away
from her.  There was no
response.  

She had no speech left and
the nurses were glad to be
rid of the man in the picture
on her broken table, broken
between the war years and
liberation.

She glanced backwards in
her dementia.  The rough
hewn Sundays, the lost
afternoons.  Her disappearances
not the less tiresome, were
gone.

She wrote letters over the same
paper, shop worn stationery,
over and over.

When she stopped it was on a
sunny afternoon.  No one knew
she left for the day before his
kiss became goodbye, with a
smile of relief.  

Caroline Shank
1.11.2023

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



.



.

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