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

Number 1.

February 24, 2023

I am using this as an attempt to navigate the last years of my life.

Number 1. February 24, 2023

I have faintly seen and
     suffered my
brain
to
blow into the next
life.  

(Oh, Yes I believe
            In Karma)

There are enough grains of
nosand now in charge of the
serious songs of our lives.

I digress

Or did I forget what I was
rattling on about.

I forget the how-to's.  I'm
on the road to Damascus.
My epiphanies are bright
shots for only a second.

I've lost direction.  The
compass of my life
tilts.

There are roads to travel
           Yet,
People to see, loves
to find.
  

But to mix thinking

this Busy
            badly
Mable.

Not until Now.


Caroline Shank
2.24.2023

Tonight is soft, the Wisconsin
winter's chill is tame and I am
practicing for queen of today.

I am lit inside.  Determined,
I breathe.  My familiar scorn
is put away. I walk the city's
street remembering, the
calming soft breathing.

Tonight is almost over and i
approach tomorrow in silence.
I walk some more in the

chilly drizzle. So soft the shadows
smile back from the store windows.
There are no don't walk signals.

The neon sign in Maxwell's flags
me, lures me inside.
I walk on.  I want to reach the
seventh block.  It's a good
number.  I stop at the gate,
a small park.  I pass it by.

My serenity is a soul sculpture.
No longer a passage in some
one's book. I author me.

Thanks to the moments of
shared caring.

I walk on enthrall of the soft
winds that bring me home.

I am returning to MySelf.

Caroline Shank
1.17.2023

I heard, the other day, a small
sound, a piece of gravely
noise.  To remember you
in the voice around the corner,
the right turn into the bathroom

where memory lay.

In the depth of a minute.
you came back.  I looked
to where you last called
to me.

The dementia still rooms away,
Your slanted smile lingered
like the Cheshire Cat's did.

All dressed up to cover the

bruises.

I began this poem to hold
you where the phantom
calls began.  To see eternity
in an hour and laughter has

it's own cry under the
lonely mask I wear.
I scan the room to
capture something as
ephemeral as yesterday

“When I was

young.’


Caroline Shank
4.4.24

I am the next wind
which crosses your neck.
The raindrop on your cheek.
When you wake up
tomorrow I will be the
crease on your face, the
tangle of your blanket.

Know this then, I will
never leave you.  The
scent of me lines your
breath.  

So now I lay me down
to sleep. I pray my soul is
yours to keep


Alt ending

So now I lay me down
to sleep.  I know your soul
is mine to keep.

Amen


Caroline Shank

You wake in the morning
all alone.  There stillness is
like a quiet stone skipping
through thought.  You leave
the remnants of a life led
with noise and clamor at
the ends of yesterday.

There is time yet to resume.
Now is perfection.  For
a brief moment you are
all that is or ever will be.

Then sound begins to
penetrate the soul of
day and you fear the
reverie will not repeat
so you drink in the
remains of a moment
so fragile and evanescent
you fear the peace will
not come to you again.

The days are full of clang
and bother. You hang on
to the dawn, remember
the instance of salvation
is a wafer of  time.

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 am enough. I am bigger

Than 10 pounds. Enough.
That old saw.
I cannot pass for Shirley
Temple

But I am responsible for my
happiness Tom.
I danced at the graves of

Voodoo priests.  

In my imagination I was
lauded by Great Spirits.

I am enough to fly between
the Holy Days, the

Vatican of my mind is
open and I ply the

pages of my long life
from my fingers.

Caroline Shank
I.27.2024

"The Lion Sleeps tonight". Do you remember that song?  I hear it on the
radio over and over  again.  The time
has come…  oh oh I am about to mix my allusions.

I am, like Alice, small inside the music.
The cliff tops of sounds are passing
before my eyes, the wind in my ear
is loud. In the jungle, the mighty
jungle, the lion paws at my scarred
heart.  His claws rip my bodice
open and blood drips on the car
seat.

Have the courage to say goodbye.
You bore me with your growling
and your furry tongue reaching
down my throat. I sing to myself
blurred lyrics. You choke me
with time away and distance
travelled alone.

I will die by myself before you sing
to me of loneliness and crap
excuses. There was beauty in
the jungle before that song
wrapped around my memory.

You were not the first to ask
me to visit midnight, to taste
the hushed and slander of
the dark jungle.

I navigate paths you only
dreamed of in me.  I roll
the canopy away and I am
in my bed alone filled with
horror at the slashed path

I trod with you.


Caroline Shank
Jun2 12, 2022

Cover me in brocade, white
brocade, and tan me under
the sun.  A little glass of
sherry and a Jane Austen

book to read.  

Mention the dances,
the kisses under raw
red crepe paper hats.

We were lovers then
the breathless of
early kisses

under the pink
percale.

We were young and
tan. We spread love
like butter on bread,
like a
summer
song by Chad
and Jeremy.

Clear the dance floor
I am on my way to
you

again.

Caroline Shank
1.6.24

When men love they move slower
than dawn rolls onto day. Arms
turn toward each other as if to
grasp their beloved as raindrops
grasp the stalk of a flower,
melting around tender shoots
like silk wrapping. They whose
feet have always left sound
behind them, their prints
evaporate in whispers.

Men gather in bundles the
persons they have been, select
the best, the finest moments,
to plant by the porch of the
adored. They go through the
weather of their passion focused,
translated into a language as
sharp, as clear, as cries in
blue sea-gulled air when
nothing but nothing stands
between nature and desire.
The goal of movement is charged
across a world lost to all
desire for choice.

Men love with a kinetic so deep,
so intimate, it is movement inscribed
on every breath.

If then the moment should
come of the crack in the bell of
the heart, when daylight rips
the landscape, they fall, as a
rock falls, to crash along a
beach utterly void of life, to
become trilobite in noiseless
water, moved by the purposeless
shift of time and stone.

Caroline Shank


(This is the best I could glean about men in love. Being female may not have helped.)

The wind is cold, the night is long.
I never sleep.  You are gone.
Swirls of pain
surround me and I leave my
body behind.

I cling to the fastness of thought,
somersault through millennia
to witness you through the
blinkless eye of light.

Time is an illusion.  We met
in the unformed moment of
creation, chased each other
around the universe.  A
cosmology of wonder.

Now, at the last,  
moments of my life
collapse down  
death like ivy on
winter bricks.

Caroline Shank

The voice, the bell-yellow
voice plays on.
Under the mind like a layer
of canvas lie the brushes
and strokes, the arms and legs
of memory.  The arrival on the
skin of sound is the moment
of love.  The unfurling of
the pallette.

You say, listen, the wail of
breath on brass is mine.  No,
it is yours.  The voice, no
longer alone, even when
unaccompanied, falls from
the blues of evenings or the
reds of afternoons, approaches
with footprints in sand.  We
are castled in music, our
colors unfurled.

Our fingers on the keys.  We
see the archetype of design in
the sound
the movement in the fabric of
stripes.  The sound’s colors
draw us to each other.
Listen.  The wail of breath
on brass is everywhere.
Listen.


Caroline Shank
Revised 3 28 2023

No matter what I will celebrate
the deterioration of my body.
I will forget the sacks of my neck.
The scarfs flesh burdens will
       not remind me that I have
six minutes to escape and that
I will fail.

No matter what you see look
closer.  I am only a ticking
clock away from myself
you knew then. I look to the
        calendar, truths that
my mother knew, the due
date is ordained.

I don't delay the search for
company, I am sitting on the
edge of my genetic map, Henry,
waiting for my skin to turn
tan, as it always did, every
summer. No matter what.

I am not gentle.  I am a kick
away from screaming. The
lies of every soap manufacturer
are written in my old face.
And I don't like it.
         I want to be loved
again, to rise in the warm
morning singing.

To be alone at the cracked end
of the sidewalk is to be tempted
over again as I was at twenty
seven. The last real estate is
sold to the younger woman.
          The light skin of my
youth is pasted on his memory.
I would no longer
           be of interest to him.

The tomorrows of then have
passed and I am in the window.
The mirror is not true, it sees
me old and alone as the last
            line of the play.

No matter what I want to
remember the suntan on my
ripe body
but gone. No matter what
I cry to be remembered
in a life of gone by

dreams.


Caroline Shank
1.29.2023

Sunlover


I lay out there nearly naked.
You are warmth and touch and
kiss.  My pores open, yield
juices that color me the shades
of heat; the browns of new-
chewed leather.  Your breath
rubs me.  Gentle undulations
thrill my almost open and ever
waiting body.

But you cannot reach me where
it counts.  Oh, would I give myself
naked, your lover, exposed.  I
would be unafraid.  As it is I
look in the glass at your outline,
rub the places for you, reaching
for the juices you should
lick but don’t.


Caroline Shank

is time unutterably changed
from the stalk of language
to
mind’s repeating evensong.

The looked for praying;
look again.

I have not come here to
talk of the night's
kiss, the borrowed ladder,

the window.  But to
reckon with the
devil for my soul's white
blazer
.
typed on it for the world to say
You are.

And the dream
of Carroll and I stay here

On the beach of
vowels spelt

long ago.



Caroline Shank
2.16.2024

For Jon

Never again.  Your voice like
thistles scrapes. It's tracks
unsteady.

Blood drains from the holes
dug by serrated edges.You
command the death of
Venus.  My throat expels
the vowels of the tirade
you unleashed.

To see, unleashed, the
ferocious silliness of
your torn words addressed
to the gods who long
before laughed at your

excavation of old bones
and misunderstandings.

Never again will you pillory
me, my torn lashings
       stung
in deep regret

for the years of meaning
now drawn closed like
curtains over a corpse.

One word bled from your
mouth, lifted me to my
knees.

Goodbye.

I laughed.

Never again.



Caroline Shank
2.28.2023

One tear leaves, shiny vestige
of the brains transcription.
A movie house of dying
images scribes in cunieform
as I watch thru my prism
of memory

The racks of yesterdays
like layers of summer boats
in winter

of the claws of
sorrow,

the yank

of tears

Birth the ends of
sorrow when love

again

Walked

in..

You stood there
reflecting
my broken
healing, a

Refrain of

Saxaphone s.
Of love

In the

Tear s.

You Blessed me
from  your
so far

away.



Caroline Shank
5.20.24

Panic spins.
I am a dervish without
a prayer.

Air pounds in my chest.
Sound is a slap.  
Thought is scrambled.

Breathless is a **** in my
stomach.  Flight is the
option.  Feathers fly.

The air is sand, filled,
unbreathable.
A storm screaming.

A rope
chokes me
into another
space from which
I fall disgraced.
.
Recovery is a movement
of clarity I receive from
your

lips on my

hands.

Caroline Shank

What i didn't know Daddy was
all the world of pain and beer.
I know you drank every night
just to slam the lid on your
mental sandbox.

The carnival of crazy that
lingered just beyond your
front door was a lapsed
Catholic's Purgatory.

You know about Purgatory,
I know you do.
The Dantesque
living room.  
I insinuate decorum
here, the bedroom stale
with fetid odors.
Cigarettes and the
unwashed
once a redheaded
beauty.

My legs ache as yours did.
No rest anyway.  Before
research.  Before the
salve of pills to calm
the crawling kicking.

I never knew Daddy that
my nightly misery was
portraiture to your pose.

You never asked me.
Never said you needed
help.  I blamed it on
the sleeplessness of a
soprano screaming

Did you know I couldn't
sleep?



Caroline Shank

Can anyone help me? Is
there a minute particle of
a sympathetic soul in the
residue of a life loudly
lived?

I don't really have a
syllable of rain to tell
of the need of personal
experience.

Someone run to me with
an outstretched hand
that I may not flail
in the cold.

God knows of my need
and He cries at your
indifference.

Go away from me, I will
struggle to keep from
showing you my unrequited
solitude.

I am called The City of
New Orleans.



Caroline Shank

I used my heart to get close
to you.  I pounded the inside
of my world.  It was magic.
My heart beat a tattoo that
you could feel a thousand
miles away.  

You knew me from the
inside.  You never turned
away.  I held you in the
palms of my hands.  Your
fragile skin translucent.

I was born to be yours.  You
marked me with your
substantial smile.  It was
never too late.  You were
a breath away from dying.
I was in the air.  

I heard the cry, I was on
the verge of living without
the blue of your eyes.  You
turned  me to breathing.
You wheeled away unknowing
that under the blanket  I
placed a breathless wish
for your heart to beat
to mine.  

Child of mud and seawater
you came at last to the
shore of my time.  

I believe in you.

Caroline Shank

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

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

The Serenade, his song
of Songs.  

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

Billy's coming home.

The wooden fence is
cleaned.  
His flag draped.

The song
ready.

Billy fell in the ditch of
Unknowing.  

His war
over.  

The Rooster cries,

Taps.


Caroline Shank

You left her
on the pale of an old wound. Just When She Needed You Most. It's
true that the world is a flat rockfilled
place.

For years she worked a new garden.
Now the songs
are warped and the plants
won't grow.

Her ramblings stutter.
But  offer
a small breath in her direction
and she dances.

Combien Monsieur for some air
you breathed, for a flower you
grew, flesh to the perfect
old dream?


Caroline Shank

I never expected this.  That
in my 70's I would be ink
on a blank page. That my
life's work would be poems
on a shelf, written about
gone people, dead memories.

I never wanted them, the memories, the reflections
stored in old coffee cans.
Waterlogged letters saved
from decay to become themselves decayed.

I will sit forever in my chair,
me and my notebooks fallen
around me, incense laden,
curled around my slippered
feet, hiding the poems pressed
in the pages of my youth.

Caroline Shank

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

She got him all wrong, the strong
arms gone to brittle.
Clay is troubled to form the
impression.  And longer the
art of your dented and salted
mire.

For nothing like a walk in the
boneyard of the cheap motel
of her imagination.  

You are Rant and Ruin.  The
Remains crust and smoke
Tomorrow of her old age is
the rat trails of her poetry

I know this because she told it
to the murk and creep of your
deteriorating smoke.  The last
**** was unimaginable.

Run far and away from the
wrinkled visage of memory.
You are red and ruins in a
slot of yesterday.

Today runs through her like
wine and bread.  The table
is set for never again your
chair is broken silt.

Caroline Shank
3.22.2023

Will you make love to me in sunlight
and in the rain?   Will you sing to me
when the hours go by? I will be in
your voice calling.  

Will you make love to me in winter
when the pale day is soft
snow against the windows?  Will
your warm breath leave patterns
on my skin?

I will be your landscape.  My love
is an echo.  You will hear me
for years.  My soul is the perfect
moment melded with your kiss.

I want you to run with me toward
the early spring of our youth. To
remember beneath the kiss lies
love unparalled in literature.

No, not Tristan and Isolde, but
the coupled clutch itself opened.
Where they were unrequited we will
soar over wars and peace.

Will you love me tomorrow when
I am rubbed with age?  I will
be the first one to go to the
stars.  I will be brave today and
you can take my soul to Heaven.  
Will you still love me tomorrow?

I will love you after you are gone.
The tears of my memory will
outlast ever your casual goodbye.

Caroline Shank

Always

(medicine in the
deserts of
burning flesh
sorrowing souls.)

People to treat.
Lives lost or given.
The cold winter sand
forever in your shoes,
your pockets.

Your mouth the harbor
for the grit of every day.
You spit it out in the

***** cups, cracked with
the rush of
hurrying mouths.

Tents breath in and
out, their ***** flabby
from pawing hands.

Today is always unknowing
if the sky will save this
planet of death.

This day of unforgiving.

The supplications of
hands

covered

In blood.


Caroline Shank
10.15.2024

What is a tear but a rip in the
Universe? A jagged hole with
edges into your soul.

No not that but a tear that drips
from the ceiling of the house
that we built.  The clay of the
beginning we wrapped carefully

before tossing loss and tears
before prayers.

I pray with bent neck and closed
fists to hold the chaos out into
some facsimile of normality

while tears tear at my soul
and hope drops down the face of

yesterday.


Caroline Shank
9.26.23

I write you when I am labored
With forgetfulness.   I am
Unfolded. My drawn out tears
slip with a staggered downhill
run.

To my amazement I am dead.
The sounds of you pleading
have passed and in my relief
I rest on your letter.  

Time me Kangaroo down boy

I'm still in love with you.  Ha!

When you fell down the tunnel
was there a bright light? Like
in the stories? Did your mother
warmly call your name?

You didn't hear the hollow
hospital call from my torn
throat.

I will go smoke now. I picked
up the old habit from a rushing
rabbit. He said my time will
be soon and my sins scrubbed

off.

Why?


Caroline Shank
8.6.2022

In this circus of the mind,
you are the dreamraker, the
seller by the booth of riches.
You are the daylight’s yellows
and the blue stratum of sleep.
We knew each other in the
shadowless angle of noon,
bartered minutes, collected
seaside the shells of
poetry.  You opened the door of
tents.  The edges of the sand’s
various galleries collapsed
into rivers, opened into books.
You are the sheik of araby, the
dream-maker, the purples
mornings brush in the eyes
of wise men.

Dreams surrounded the day’s
median.  Time was, red was the
color of afternoons pressed
against us.  Now the tents
move nearer the water than
you.  The past is covered
canvas, the future is the wet
unbroken fabric of beach.

The bazaar closes, tents fold,
pictures painted on the moon’s
memory move on.  You and I
walk to the uncut littoral,
carve footprints in the cool
green silence, the first morning
of the world.

Caroline Shank

I never saw things falling off
your shelves.  I didn't grasp
the hands of the clock who
bore witness to your aging,
frail thoughts.  The lack of
tremors fooled me.  The
mood swings were the
arthritis, oh! the pain.

I was so little then, so wrapped
up in my own sorrow.  I glanced
up and you diminished.  We were
old, our lives run out.  You took
the memory breach as a left
turn to Heaven. You cried when
you thought me unfaithful.

Never were you so.wrong.   I
served you silver but you
pointed to the floor.  My tears
were landslides.  Tomorrow
kept coming and the ashes
rested.  I walked out of the
chapel with sticks.

The years go on and I am

so still

in the

jungle,

pray to be eaten.


Caroline Shank
04.17.2023

My Forsythia has one lone yellow
flower.  A sapling.  The petals hover
close to the ground as if afraid of the
sunlight that shines a neon sign.
Maybe Spring is coming to this
chilly Wisconsin May?

The temperature dropped 10 points
just now.
There is snow on my mind.  After
all one yellow flower does not mean
others will follow.

I will take a look at it and see if I can
go on.  I too am lonely in my singular
stem of hope.  Summer will follow
at a distance.  Autumn will come
tromping behind the scenes of
sunlight on my garden.

Lord, what are gardens for?


Caroline Shank

It takes a long time to get here.

I almost didn't make it but

around every person is a

reason to get where you

want to be.


I want to get to the last minute.

To ride the carousel,

to grab the ring, walk the

soft sand.  Raise the umbrella.


Birds scatter on the beach.

Caw loudly.  I celebrate this

windshorn day.  I want to run 

through my life catching

miracles.  Godparticles

in the blowing sand.


Curl me in scent.

Lay me down.

in


celebration,

of a life lived.


I am reflected in you. 



Caroline Shank

I have collected clocks, chickens,
plates and owls.  In this room where I
savored the sounds and sights of my
long ago dismantled fragments. I reside

alone.

What
should have been
passages to

this, my old age,

it's the clocks I liked the best. They
drove you crazy.

It was always the same.

I'd sail forth on my Journey
of Discovery.  Not for long.

You wanted me to be smaller.
Less involved.  Life to you
was a spoonful.  Rationed
in a war without things.

It was the ticking of the
clocks as they went away
this last time.

It is the ticking of my
surrendered
soul you are left with.

I wait for the last
object to leave.  Then
we will be all but
a tick of time,

alone.

Caroline Shank

It was a dark and dreary night.
I interrupted your journey.  Did you rush back? Your big green car traveling a familiar road you thought rolled up with me

outside.

I stood in the rain, calling.
You were unafraid.  So
many tears.  So many years.  The dizzying

speed.

My brown Chevy crumpled
on the side road where the
beach released pain
into flight.  I have no way
to reconnect the lost days.
The hospital of my bandaged


memory.

Forgive me for i digress
in my old age.  I cling like cellophane to the memories
I am alone

surviving.

Caroline Shank

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

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

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

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

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

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

you

can't see me wildly

search your face

for

recognition.



Caroline Shank

Cruel is the silence after.
the love goes.
The nights when the
breeze

freezes and the frogs
lose their croak.

Silence like the stillness
  of a child's bare footed
  climb into our bed.

Midnight is the silence
     after the rain goes.

I touch the silence with
      my mind.  I map the
      road  to a

tomorrow I don't want,
never asked for.  

The place is quiet.
      There was a stop
       a ways back.

You left me by the Willow.
       I couldn't call your name

You left me by the sand dune.
       and when I looked back

you never saw me

again.


Caroline Shank
11.03.2024

Thoughts on a Sunny Morning


It's a sad **** day when
Memories fail and
leave without
a tool
for poetry.

Ric holds
the gate
but not the

key

Soulless longing for
the accidental brush
of synchronicity.
The breath of destiny.

Drunk on yesterday,
Without the touch
of indifference

memories under
consciousness
flay

me.

Bleeding,
the
pressure of
old promises

Unwright

me

Caroline Shank
5.15.2024

Somewhere I Started to Cry.

The bus pulled out.

He didn't notice.
There were chunks of
concrete slabs big
enough to hurl.

The last one lands
away from me. I shout!

Tomorrow! The War will end
Tomorrow.
Hold my hands, my mother

is dying.

The phone is ringing out
the news that I am now
Bob Barker's next
contestant.

I'm not given a paddle
or number. My shirt

Is Unwritten.

You came to save me from
the
Hell

Of undone promises.  

Evocation of a snarly
life

at your feet my deah.



Caroline Shank
9.10.2024

Recumbent in my brown

velour reclining chair I

dream of Ireland.  Never

having been there at all.


My path through the green

hills of my father's family

county winds to the shingle

and thatch pub.  I meet

Kieran where there is

dancing and beer-o. 

Bagpipes and kilts.


In my reverie, 

I top off warm Guinness,

and tumble to the blarney. 

of the sweet, moving, man who

slides toward me with

Irish blue eyes. 


I cry out

the sounds

of a lost, lonely, song.


I wake in my chair,

a long way 


from home.



Caroline Shank

I am the Audience.  I write
to hear what I have to say.
This jumble of verbs and
adjectives, this conglomeration
of images is my body.

These warts and crevices, the pocks
of my life roll up into
words.  I copy them in the winter
and I write with them in the
long summer mornings.

But you, you predate my vocabulary.
And I say to myself you Are.  I
make you from the letters of
experience.

How else to tell the world, and
I must tell the world, that I exist,
that you live.  You are the noun.
I write to keep myself formed
into the story we made.  You
are the Subject of this
safari through my bones and I
am the Author.

My pen spills, a diary of tight
lighting firing through the
ink.  I write to say you
exist.

I scribe this plot thralled
Gothic romance.  
The story is always the same.

You, you are alive somewhere
in the world of words
I create.

And I,
I am your god now.


Caroline Shank

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 an Elderly woman fit
Only for the company of fine
women and the occassional
fake Mimosa.  My hair is
white, the before longed for
auburn is past.  Bottles in
a old shelf

Today is the dreamed of
moment lived like a zoo
animal in the back cage.

I will eat cereal from a cake
cone thrown to me by those
without the wrinkles of my
experience.

Not given the dignity of a
place in the sun. My youth
mispent. I spend my time
cleaning which my dead
husband thought amusing.

I only smile when I think
Tomorrow will come to

Everyone.

Soon.


Caroline Shank
12.23.2023

I see you every
night elongated in warm
dreams on Summer skies.

I touch my face with
your memory now still warm.
My fingers smooth tears.

I am sad in the
act of kissing you. Goodbye
is a sorry dream.

I see you every
day through the scrim on the
Proscenium stage.

Goodnight Sweet Prince I
knew you well. I hold you still
in my folded hands.

Caroline Shank

It is the ragged ends of tonight
that my pen hovers over lhe
linen pre drawn the colored
lines. Oh tout le monde.

The heavy scent of patchouli
after all the years….
Folded bell bottoms in
flowers splash and i

bend at the waist.
******* fall cold touch
the air that I breathe
swept my wait against

You as the scramble

began.


Caroline Shank
10.18.2023

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 collect Things

I collect things.
Dreams in a jar, old
soap in the sunlight.

Leftover buttons from
plaid shirts i
used to wear when
I was young.

Fingers now riddled
with arthritis comb
thru junk
drawers.

Pictures of my children.
Babies are always good
before school lures them
to the trenches.  I collect
paintings from preschool
and gifts from museum
shops. Little owls from

when I collected owls.

I collected chickens.
I tried to make it up to
you, your mother's cabbage
and chicken dinner.

I collect the visits to
Door County.  The
shops we entered,
the breakfast we
drove 4 hours to
accomplish.

You wore your last smile
like a yellow slash.  I
collected the sound
you made, the whisper of
dying. The last soft
skin call cry.

I collect the days you
never left me.  The rolled
up newspapers of
the years
you never read.

I collect the lost years
we, to each other,
in rolled up brown
suede corners.


Caroline Shank

I studied a little mythology, some Jung, a tad Freud.  I've read Durrell and Robertson Davies among other things.  I am in tangles over
myself.

My Id  is full of archetypes.  My
Ego is aware of my upside down
Superego.  My parents were
Very ******* up. It's no wonder
I lick my fingers before I eat
the soup.  It's the Golden Bowl
thing.  I think that's it.

I am populated with fantasies.
I can fly around the sun w/o
melting, visit Grandma and slay
dragons before lunch.

I save my children from the
Gorgons around them and
clean their faces when they
are done.  It's a hero thing.

I can ****** Poseidon when I
feel like it but that ****** trident
undoes me everytime.

I was your Anima when I was
younger now I am your crone.
I could never get Siggy to
realize that.  It was in a coke
cookie moment I gave my
soul to Shakespeare and
died old and unrepent.

It is in mythology that
you love me. Only me
and Forever.

I am Everywoman.


Caroline Shank