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the moment, repealed the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

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'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 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

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

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

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

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

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 recently had that flash of
"Oh My God! "

The shirt dropped to the floor as I
reached to stop it.  I thought it
terribly unfair.   It fell first.

She thinks the first she knew was
saddened by the thought she was
not the first.

It happens, whatever "it" is, before
speech or breathing.  

Tomorrow is over first. Today's
blooms have fallen before
its scent prys recognition.

Reality, I said recently in some
class, is the happy accident of
memory.  It was at the beach
that I realized that

You arrived first. I only

remembered you.


Caroline Shank


8.27.2022

I sit here.  

The winds
of late summer
sweep the curls of
dust over the
linoleum floor.

I think about
what it is to be declined,
to be culled out
as a small fish
is thrown back to the boy.

It was a rush
we exceld in
those years when

all I ever wanted was you,
and the music on the juke box in
the corner booth.  You wore
red plaid, but
it was your eyes that
portalled always,
the galleries we
explored frequently before
love.

I smoke a cigarette
or something,

inhale the evening.
think of the
Excavations:

The Creases of Conversation
that reflect in madness.
The Manuscripts of memory
scribed in
the night.

I lean into Friday.



Caroline Shank
8.25.2022

.
Candles light the way to my worn
torn books.  I read every night.  The
covers loosened from the binding.

It is a fragile thing that I have come
here to write you.  I am a little out of
shape.  The company of great
writers intimidate me. I am wrapped around the stylus of an idea.  

In some way think of this as an
entry into my thoughts.  Are you
interested in the nocturnal rambling
of my old, my favorite phrases?

Something in me likes to hear you,
in your deep voice, read to me what
I write.  My imagination startles me.

The candles are burnt enough.  
You will not return to this library
which you began so long ago.

I write to you in my diary,
Harker, words you fling from the
runaway carriage window.

I will never die and I will look
for you in my books forever.

I listen to the wind through
the pages.

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 can't do death again. Unlike the
soldier on the garden path who
treads his life in patterns I have
no facility for more losses.

If life is a Waste Land don't
remind me.  The blooms fall
from the dogwood, the daffodil
peeks up between the sidewalks.

The footfalls down some passage
which I did not take are the
detritus of a long life unearned.

Don't offer me your hand today.
When I am through this garden
path of reminiscences I will
forever make your tea,but I
will not speak of him who
bought my life.  He whose

mistaken leaves of memory
are trodden cold in the
footfalls of the unearned past

My past, the illusion of it rose
before this likeness in the mirror.
To be wrong changed the brown
hair to white.  The pattern of
silk to cotton.  The warm sun
to cold .

Patterns formed in the sequence
of a love unfilled like the house
not bought or the flower unbloomed.

I can't do death again.  Go with me
along this garden path to the
opened door.  I will take your arm
and I will not look back .

Caroline Shank
04.15.2023

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

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

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

Morning drips in like coffee.
I think of you. It is the
hardest time.  I begin the
day in sips. My tongue
burns with greed.

You seep in through the
slats of my sleepy windows.
The day starts with memory.
Your red hair curls
around the sun.  I reach out to
touch you.  I want to kiss
the blue of your eyes across
the table.

I, sadly, drink the dregs of
my morning, wash the azure
off my face and dry my tears
to carry me through to
tomorrow.

Mornings drip in like coffee.
I think of you.

Caroline Shank

On Sitting Alone at Costco Eating a Hot Dog

and wishing you were there, the
strong maleness of you,  Your
daily grip on my loneliness. The

wait for you to get out, call me.
The beef flesh taste so long
forgotten on my tongue.
Tonight will be too late.  You

will not find me there   My old
walk out the door will never
find you looking

I sit alone knowing that this
long, left over afternoon will be
the last warm memory of

today.

I will go home from here and
prepare the socket of my own
life to leave this place

Forever.

Caroline Shank
9.28.2023

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 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

'There is, at midnight, a swoosh,
a backward sound
unheard at 6 o'clock.
Time licks the moment,
the bells, the knock on
tomorrow.  

We amaze
as dawn asks for its
audience and our last
guesses fade into
today.  

Nascent trails
of memories rise and
fall

into the rescue mission
the sunlight brings on
feet of clod.

It will be a day of reaching
into the pocket of love
newly incarnate.  

You
receive me.

Caroline Shank
March 3, 2025

You breathe in my heart a
song so sweet that I
swing on a cloud.  You
dance me around the
daylight and lay with me
during the night of dreams.

I will be on the side of your
red pleasure as you call
to me to be blessed by the
flavor of goodness.

We swing on a star.
You make me glad to run
with you, the wind, and
our song.

Together we fly over
mountains and lakes.
We grasp the promise
of tomorrow.

We are in the tumble
and the flight of wind
upward.

We are unflappable. Together.
we lay upon each other's heart
a solumn moment. The eternal
fabric of time.



Caroline Shank

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

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

It's a bad **** day here in
Texas.
The winds are hot and it's
starting to rain.  

I cant find my coat.  It got
lost at your funeral.  Now
my dry cheeks are wet
and i cant see where to go
The cracks in my face
are artificial.

The frogs are jumping after
phantom bugs, drugged
on the arid silence

I dont know how to do this.
Alone is an art form. No one
said it was Easy.  Willie's song
playing in my mind like a
jumping blue frog in the desert
that has come inside

I crossed the line too late.
All of your self is in the
pillow i no longer use.

I think i will read through
the afternoon. I can always
Cry in bed.

Tomorrow is another anniversary.

Caroline Shank
1.9.2022

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

Walk the Gulf side
Steals your love and back

The ubitiquos lure of sand dollar,

the caw of the gulls piaint
Statements.

We will make, love.  The vow
is Absolute.

Clouds form a canopy.

Tomorrow's walk will
be another step in
the sea call to us,

love crossed,
We bow

to our loves
own

Destination


Caroline Shank
8.1.2024

That song, that miserable song
will never go away.  That night, the dark night of my soul, is not able to sleep. The pounding of the sound of it breeching the television speakers sends be
back in time.

You know what I mean? The
remnants of a teenage memory
is a sorry stream.  I wake up
every day not knowing if I
will be in that backseat, again. The Lion is awake
and my hands shake with
your memory.  

I am all alone in the space
between reality and nightmare.
My toes touch the floor of the
car, my hand disappears into
the upholstery.  I thought you
liked me.  Funny that.  

The Lion slept all night and
when he woke up he laughed.
My throat ached with the sound
of his roar, the music wimowaying on the radio and I was alone in that crowded
backseat.  

The jungle, the mighty jungle,
rained and the laughter of teenage boys circling the
beat up car smelled of stale
beer and the sodden remains
of my fourteen year old's illusions

died.

Caroline Shank

Try me, myself, into
the last chapter of my life
Today is full of Autumn
The call to the Winter
Poet to change from love
to the song of nights long
trill of darkness.

Climb down the
ladder. Reach for the
blue book.  The days
shorter my longing,
my wasteland

I'm over the reverie
of the old lady.  I
meditate and wait
to go.  


Caroline Shank
10.7.2024

Things On My Living Room Wall

I collect things, clocks and chickens
mostly.

         The secret to things is the
way they (you) fit in the space
wherein my life, refracted like a
          Kaleidoscope on a
winter afternoon stretches to
touch me.

        Day (Love) is a mirror, a silver
lined looking glass placed like a
trophy over the catchall mementos
          of (you) the times (we) spent
leaning over the bridge.

My frames
tilted to the downside of yesterday
.        
          I thought the assorted colors
were (our) memories until someone

          traced the lines of (simply)
life between the slats of my

          memory indicted of
your coins to pay the porter.


Caroline Shank
7.4.2023

I learned early that **** was the form
of choice for ***.  Not that the act was
named or the ****** ugly.  

Where in the world are you all now?
you mealyworms.  How like you to
teach me violence as love and leave
me to learn the lesson so well.

I recline.  **** is the sharing of two
faces.  Your face smells of beer and
your pounding hips ground me.  I
lie.  You are a broken bottle smacked
against a building on a hot summer night.

You are the cigarette before left in the
weeds.  I learned from you not to trust
the backseat of cars, to wait for calls
from the garbage man’s son.

Trash man, black car, you hung
on a tree.  All your sperms dangle
in the light of the bowling alley, shine
in the rubber.

Old man, pound on me till you think
I am satisfied.  Old man.  Eat ****.
        old man eat ****
        old men eat ****, grow bald.
        Remember me in the dashlight
        I was the fifteen year old rubbed
        drunk, sunk under the haze of
        horror.  You were the gun.


Caroline Shank

Grief is a filled cloud,

vapor.
Limp.

  reaches

failed prisms.

are
easy when
night and day figures
debit
your

Balance.

my
Observation:
you

Gone.


Caroline Shank
April 15, 2025

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



.



.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please.

Caroline Shank

Patterns

The first bell tolls
White noise in the
green dawn.

Are you awake? The daylight
throws up on the rug images
of time refracted.  The
shape of bodies
satisfying a long cry.

Peace slips under the
door, spreads like an oil
stain,  

Time becomes the Apple
Tree.  The future is
truncated.  You walked

away

and I, I lay across the
weather and bury my

head.

Your poem covers me

Like

     a

       shroud.


Caroline Shank
6.18.2014

Come and sit upon my morning.
Hold me close in sunrise arms,
whisper east winds
gently in my ear.
Wash my lonely night away.

Come and sit upon my morning.
Hold me close in sunrise arms.
Kiss me sunlife
through the window glass
between us.


Caroline Shank

Hope, slowly pathed in the
clear smoke of a joint,
gone.  

Caged aspirations.  Who
gave permission to stoke
the mourners,
to increase the music?

In the wake of his youth
he said No to the sight
of lost doors.  Thrown
stones.

Where were you when
the dancing began? The
title of the sermon undone
in the

Church

Of

Insanity.


Caroline Shank
9.1.2022

I try for a gentle sound, to
say your name in quiet tones,
so like a bird having given
birth in a nest might not cry,
but would settle down to an
afternoon of birdsong, her
charge warm and waiting
for the yolk of future singing
be without requests having
no knowledge of choices.

Caroline Shank
June 16, 2022

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

How long before you noticed
     I was absent?
Would you boot up expecting
     me to have my sunshine
     waiting like someone
     breathing in the air of your
     expensive cologne, alone?

That is the important part.  Would
     you pay no mind to the
     unspoken fragility of my delay?
Can you see me through the glare
     of my absence?

My hands, so still, make no move
to flex, the prelude movement, to
lightly brush the keys which spell
your name. The button I do not press to
start the bubble of exuberance, tingling. .
My chest contracts deeply and i
breath your name in a ritual obeisance
you might call a whisper.  I land
on the keys rubbed too shiny from use,
as a supplicant might continually rub
the Chalice.

I exaggerate, here,  the thought that
you would notice the omission
of a stain on the white cloth of my
restlessness.  I bow to yesterday.
Today waits.  Unexplain my
heart, call me by my name.
    

Caroline Shank

The crepe paper days of late June,all of them, the Summer of 74, are on
a spinning boat  in my old imagination. I have ridden the warm
days and lingered over a shared
joint by the light of a satin moon
for so long now I no longer shake
myself to be sure you haven't
gone, like a stone on the lake's shore,
which, when washed up on the moraine, dangles in a wave and is
gone again.  As with you

on a raining night, running for
someplace to hide.  Death almost
did part us.  As the marriage
of two souls, destroyed, died.

Lest you ever learn of my long, lingering, pain, know how I loved you
old as when we were young and
ragged with the raw edges of an
impossible dream. But you
left me and in the undoing of myself
I woke alone from the sting
of unbelief.

Sorrow does not preclude death,
but it is in the years of grief, searching for a way across the long embattled
memories,

that we die.



Caroline Shank

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

Absolved of all guilt I have
passed the threshold of
old age.  I am a Crone and
I choose who to love.  

I choose you.  Unintentional
as this late in life emotion is, I
follow it to the rise and
fall on the tides waves that

rock you to sleep
My younger perfect
Incarnation.  You to
whom I cannot touch

I rest in the God of
my unreason for out of my
heart stepped you and

I rise each day just to see
you pursue a life out of

all unknowing

me.


Caroline Shank
July 17, 2023

Sounds In Silence

Tomorrow comes like a slap
on my cheek.  It waits in the
drains of today like a cat, reaches
for my footstep. Trips me up.

Yesterday slithered into the
cesspool of memory.  I am
a flag in your stand of
cardboard in the window
in Chicago, at the corner
of Rush and State.

Today I set my feet to
find the last place where
the countless clocks struck.

There is no sound in the
Universe today.  All the bells
are open sockets without time.
I am looking for the trigger.

The last walnut cracked under
your weight without warning
and I stand here again

alone.

Caroline Shank
08.27.2023

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

There's an elephant in the room.
(Don't you ******* hate cliches)
It's growing around the furniture
up and over the years of careful

coaching.

I can't pretend at last.  You need
to ride the carnival behemoth
out of here so we can breathe.
The pink lady waits for her

automobile.

I want to go to that place where
emotions are colored and the
candy is not cotton. Where the
taste of chocolate rides my

mouth.

Another dime in the juke box
please.  The circus is pulling
out and all the cliches mount
up to the wedding of Miss

Haversham.

Nothing else makes

sense.


Caroline Shank
3.9.2023

I am as close to death as can be
before the Throne of the Lord
lets me kneel before Him who
ordained that I should live such
a little life.

There will be no tomorrow, no
prayers before sleep tonight.
I am in thrall with my journey's
ending and I wait for the Great
Kindness to take this burden.

I am alone with only tears and
this pen to sign off before you
can call me back.

You would do that, you whose
memory outlasts wars and famine
and the last days of America.
I have touched you in private
places and feel the warmth of
you alive.

I am cold tonight.
I bring memories
to the fire of sighs.

I go tonight to the last
long longitude of my
existence and send
these bones sans

thought

desire

and regret

to your address of sorrow.


Caroline Shank
2.17.2023

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

So the days fly by, the migrations
begin again. The Geese
flying in all directions
except South

Winter is chewing the edges
of daylight.  Tomorrow it will
be Summer for the last

vestiges of the northern
calendar

My boots are in the rack.

Christmas is an afterthought

Jesus’ saccharine journey
through leather covers

trails the ribbon of His
birth.  My house needs
a cleaning.  There is
no coffee.

You will be here in the
fullness of time
We will close the door
on these infernals.

I am taught to be strong,
to not invite you to my

party.

My sadness is only a voice
In the wilderness

You wipe my tears


Caroline Shank
9.14.2024