I am reminded of your face
when the wind blows over me,
when the sun's light shifts
to summer.

We knew each other
in the solstice of our
lives once.  You turned to
me and the light streamed.

Remember me in that light.
My hair not yet quite white.
Remember me in the
while of time.  I was the
wine in your glass's
reflection.  You were
the glass in my
Waterford world.

Run to me.  But know I am
fragile, still afraid.
You left me in the rain.
Come to me now
in the sun
of your returning.



Caroline Shank

It's the wartorn pedestrian
whose  tears fall on the
heart's side streets.

Veins of regret that curl
the same pain.  It's not
the sorrow that hurts, it's
the gullibility of time's
unlearn-ed lessons.

The old suffer
most.  The pandemic
of hope again in
the release of
lyrics left long ago.

The letdown lisps
it's own goodbye, prefigured
in the drawl of soft sighs.

Goodbye is muted
and falls to the floor.

It sinks to the power
of your poetry.



Caroline Shank

It all happens between the cracks.
My life to be cliche.  Light barely
flickers between the shift lines
in the cracked ground.

I worked nights for many years
in a hospital of sunless windows.
I slept badly and spent summers
lying on the mostly deserted
strip of lake Michigan beach.

A suburban by choice, I felt no
real need for company.  Still
don't.  There is always the chance
of a thought misunderstood, a
glance mislaid on the face
of someone outside.  

Lives that are sunlit and brave
always try to haul me out and
unfold my wrinkled insistence.
I wear the pale gleam of darkened
hallways into old age.

I am, by choice, a crone of
undistinguished personality.
A poet peeking out between
the veins of life.  

I am chosen to, occasionally,
shine a little light from under
the sidewalk.


Caroline Shank

There are things that I have done.  There are songs that
I have sung.  The Beatles
said it best.

I have been pregnant twice.
It was a long time ago.  Now
my grandchildren are grown.

I have held a few jobs. I did
them well.  My bosses were
pleased.  Well not Tim. He
was a *******. But Joyce was Amazing.

I have been friends with
wonderful people.  All except a few have left of no accord.

I am lonely in old age, barren
of thought. Yet still I write you
my phantom friend.  I hug
myself and long for the cigarette days.  The nights of Tia maria
and wine.  Do you still put
your lips around the bottle?
You said not to spill a drop.

The summer's by the lake.
My tan self at home in the
suburb of my youth and
middle age.  I was startingly
free and loud in laughter.

Everything in my plot of
Summer smelled of you.
Years ago when you lied
lovingly so as to keep me
in the cocoon of your
conversations.  I was
unfooled. I remain in the
mind of Narcissus, your
willing amanuensis. X the
night of unremembering
all these years of you.

Caroline Shank

It's a rainy day in the usual
cool of Wisconsin in the
dark months.  
There are  hundreds of shades of
gray and dun.

I am wide awake and missing
the sunlight of better times
when my soul prospered.
The sweet taste of warm on my
face.  You on my mind and
long walks.  I have grayed out
the summer
days when
you were the only thing on
my landscape.

Winter has turned all my
thoughts to long shadows
of memory.  You were never
gray or dun colored.  You
are inside me in colors of
radical brilliance.

Tomorrow I will assign the
sorrow.  Today the fragility
of missing you is like fine
single panes of memory I
cannot shatter.

On most days you lay
quietly in the soft room
of yesterday.
Today you are restless.
I shake myself awake but
the dream insists.

I'm old to myself while you
remain young in the roundness
of a single summer.  The fabric
of warm on my nascent love
has pins and sticks me.

Don't walk in.  I am
not available.  My hair is no
longer the color of amber,
My tan limbs are startling
In their denial of tan.

I think of you throughout
poetry. The long lines
of unmetered days return
but I get on.

Mistake me not for ignorance.
The vocabulary of my life
begins and ends in
four
short
months.

Caroline Shank

UIt's not like Dinner where you
Tell the maitre d to give you
a different slice of prime

rib.

You can't slip the pastry
into your pocket this time.

Called out for your writings,
for the chains of thought

You were
heed less in your

Society

Today's the day for
the bells

to ring. The justice.

Please EXCUSE me

I Abhor the convenient
L

To learn is to
scrape the jug.

of

The Grains

Of conversation

s. No. I cannot
marry you

Like this.






Caroline Shank
06.20.20.2

Finding Beauty


in brokenness is a
fine how do you do Ma

You broke me in slivery
pieces when I was a little
girl. I am crackled like
the century in which we
were born.

You died with the tainted
Soil still on your hands.
I outlived the strangled
ivey you plaited me with.

My mends are obvious.
Gold veined patches
wind through my skin.
I am not an art form.

I am good wood burned
dark for your satisfaction.
I peel off the bark.

I found not beauty, but
redemption in the years
beyond your death.  I am
unbounded and only
slightly born.  

Life is an adventure but
to you it was a safari.
Your family was your
prey but it's ok

I have found beauty in
my life anyway.  You almost
killed me.

But...

"That Which Does Not
**** Me Makes Me
Stronger"


Caroline Shank

I did not do that. The blotch
is the size of the sun
Methods of communication.
Failed mornings.

You saw the results of my
conversation before I did
Information quarreled with
meanings.. What should
be is not a reason to be.

Again the day begins with
prayer.  The end of prayer
cannot be its beginning.
The early morning empty

verses die of loneliness.
I die of repetition, of
stomach crunching fear.

I cannot find the night
in the car, the ******
shorts, your silence
drills me a lobotomy.

All this be the ends
of days and thought
moves slowly
backwards.

Caroline Shank
10.9.2023

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

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

Bombs mix with the
night sounds.

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

The enemy blurred.

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

A kiss goodbye.

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

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

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


Caroline Shank

The magic is in the jewels,
or in the swing of the
pendulums, the ubiquitous
kneading, itch

that pushes me..

No.
I stop.  I transfer my
packages, the balance
of the task I have

is

to love you on the wind,
to salvo a minute
the sound

neither bang nor whimper.

The lick of the tick of
the groin tingling
anticipation.

You are Beautiful in your
distance where I cannot

dance.

Moonlight light the place
wear we should

Believe

The Word.



Caroline Shank
08.26.2024

Afternoon


is when we made love
the first time. The only
time really.  It was the
shadow of four o'clock.

I remember your welcome
voice,  my shy
goodbye.

Every day I wait by
the window.  Your tan
coat and brown hat
disappear. You
vanish and I run
head long down
the years.

You fall from me like
grace.  Your face the
mold I make with my
hands each afternoon
at four o'clock.

In the window above
the lamppost I wait.

Everyday
the snow falls and
on my frozen
soul rests your
goodbye.


Caroline Shank
3.24.20

Prompt:. The word Afternoon.

I don't want to waste your time.
Waste, baste, taste.  Lick the *** clean, clean, bean, dream whoops bad rhyme.

I don't want you to read me
so closely.  Read, bead, seed.
I rhyme to know I am alive.

Like a bee buzzes, dances on
flowers, makes honey, bunny, sunny, money.

Don't try me out until you have tasted me, peanut butter and jelly on white bread, toasted me.
Bananas like Elvis.  Home schooled and everything, ping, fling, ding.  I love you.  

I don't want to sing, ring, bing,
ting.  Call me.  I will tell you
the truth.  

You don't love me really, dilly, silly way to rhyme your time

away.

Caroline Shank

I lack everything
I have no essence to cherish
I am dense to myself
Fear prowels my thoughts

The Divinity in me
Waits for no one
I am unblessed
Repulsed by nature
Coward
Today

I will return to my Recovery
Lessons learned

The deadend is not
signed
It is a curve that
ends on the
Last Exit to Chicago.

Caroline Shank
May 1. 2024

Long ago I was born.
Generations have grown
up around me.  I am
reminded of this by
a recent escape from
depression.  

Cynara.

I have loved as well as
I have been able.  But
I am not full to the brim
of life just yet.

I offer
crepuscular years,
roses that grow
in the shade, and
warm wine at
supper.

Please forgive
the imperfection
of a soul survivor.
The choice was
made by God.


Caroline Shank
3.23.20

"I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,"

Down the pipes it pours.
Wet, earthy smelling and
warm in July.

Keep the sounds for
me.  I hear only the
horns and slather
of the wet cars.

Rain in the buckets.
Rain in the storm
drains.  The pouring
down street lamps
glowing at night.

Rain.  The song of
Songs in the Bible
of my life.

I stand still in the
night.  Listening
for your voice
in the splash of
rain

on my face.

Caroline Shank

(Do you remember Columbine?  I do.
From Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris
straight through to Anthony Ferrill
of yesterday's Milwaukee nightmare,
the deaths like a drumbeat go on,)

Shooters like thistles crawling
in their dementia to our cities
leave trails as the unexplainable
cancer claws to vine into our
conscience.  We listen to the

words as waves of newspeak
write the epitaph of our known
society.

Deeds as gunshots slap the
faces of we who can no
longer sleep. The panacea of
Peace In Our Time has rotted
limbs.

I live in the branches,
the false years of  the 50's.  
The Days of Our Lives
are indeed shot with a

bang

not

a whimper



Caroline Shank
2.27.20

Vacation

Florida stretches from nose to
fingertips.  The bold noise of up
here relaxes into  saltwater
beaches.  

I walk along tidepools and search
for wildlife burrowing in the sands
outer banks. The sun is my
companion. We know each other
well.

My tan hands reach for you and
we are stones in the wind.
To love is enough.  To touch
is the breeze of  night.  We
stay still in a swirling mass
of gulls.

Tomorrow is Return,  Today
is the prayer for the birds
to bring their young  to my
castle.

Castles fall,  Dreams lie for a
moment where the seas spilt
the sweat anxźd salt of love

lost  


Caroline Shank
9.14.23

The fires are determined to rub
out the names.  The paths of
thousands of years.  Gone.
The Great Aboriginal voices
are spread thickly through the
ash.

Tomorrow is irrelevant.  The
peace pipes are gone.  The fires
littered.   The White faces cross
California.  The scores are
zero.  The scorched ground
bereft.  

There is a song sung in sadness
among the stumps of sacred trees.
There is a wail from the White
souls.  The Indian sorrows whisper
sympathetically.  

Alone in the smoke.  Our
children dare to rebuild.  Hand
in hand the Ancestors applaud.

Caroline Shank

Not so, really, the seat of spring,
a car of dark cloths, the voice of
boys and whispers.  Do it.

Do it, the lion sleeps tonight
playing on the radio.  Do it.

Forty years the lion is awake.
I remain in the back, handblack,
churning.  My stomach is den
solid now and hungers for the
shallow response.  The song
played then shouts out loud.

Do it.  I wrestled with it, and drowned.

The lion sleeps not I think.  I see
the mane of his black head, the
italian tomorrow of my fourteenth
year roared from him.

I did it in the maw of that music.
I held onto the ****, pretended
to feed the wimoway.  Never done.

I did it to the music of the *******
who whispered to me of the jungle.
I did it to the tune of the ***** that
pinned me to the mighty song.

The lion sleeps.  I think not yet.
Snickersnack the wimoway is
whacked low and I drown in the
song.  I did it, like a nun who fears
perdition if she drops the rosary.

The lion sleeps tonight.  In the jungle
the ******* NewYork night
pads on and on.  I don’t sleep.





Caroline Marie Shank

Godot

The space between love
and tomorrow harbors
the lost, the arbiters
And the waiting.

I am waiting for Godot,
But he is not coming.
Noone is..  This place,
where's dialog plates,
where the audience
sees failure

My heart
beats a
Tattoo, a

small wine glass.
A swallow lefť,

An initial fades.
Love

Rubs off
With the
Cleaning

Cloth


Caroline Shank
8.2.24

Raw is when I scrape my
bare knee.  While the curl of a
bleeding bone can be seen
in bas relief beneath the
red blanket of the aid
worker.

Will a bandaid help?

I think about the war, well
any war.  The rude smears
of blood, the silence that
carries voices across
continents.  Television
surpasses even what

my imagination imagines.
I think about you in the
doorway to the aid station.

The world according to
CNN.  Children's screams
form a sound blanket
over which you must
scream just to hear

your many secret sounds.

Secret for the breadth it
takes

to reach your caring
embrace.

I want to die in your arms.
If I have to fight for the

Singular look of a love

No one can

damage

I Will.



Caroline Shank
10.30.2024


.

The classic curves, the map
Lent from God carried on
the mitochondria, the map

lives on brushes of sable
(If you are lucky) Or even
straw. The curves which,

denied to me,

send the lumps of my

age

over to you with

fear.

of love again under

covers.

The last supper of my

dying.

The caves of mirrors

are your eyes

And the locks on my joy.


Carolina Shank
9.8.2024

I miss the real photographs.
The leaves of pictures I turn
over. The names and dates.
The high school graduation
memories.

My babies growing up when
film was their reflection of
summer and school. The
birthday parties slightly
blurred, a little out of focus.

The didital cameras next
with their zingy zoom.  A
little clearer now blurred
by tears.  

I hold these images to be
self-evident memories. I
hold them to my face to
smell the suntan lotion
and the scents of pine and
snow.  The birthday candles.

I choke on school pictures.
New haircuts each year. The
leather of first days.

The photograph albums are
stored for space.  I miss the
luxury of turning leaves. The oh wows of yesterday's Kodak
captured babies little butts.

My phone has a thousand
pictures In the palm of my
hand

I never look at but can
share in email in a
solipsistic minute and
click to the end.

Caroline Shank

The phone rings
Saturday is bath night
Monday laundry.

No Amish here
said Peter.

Sleep is a distant
Relative

You are a mask
.
I told you.

You aré
my attachment
to things

Christmas and

This tea ceremony

Blesses our union.

And our children.

We escaped
The introduction
Made love and

drank a toast.
The bitten
Sandwich

grew into

a love poem
evanescent as

Foam

Filling as
marrow
Fills the
bone.


Caroline Shank
7.14.22






.

Thought is always with you like a child
growing in your deepest spaces.  To think
is what you were born for.  You are alive
with questions that brood in your mind
unlimited possibilities.  What do you
read, you who are books?  You
press yourself.

Thought pounds within you.  Each beat
is a hundred years of knowledge.  You
were imprinted on intelligence.  Your
selective Mother.

Thought is always with you.  Lines of
poetry choose to be born through your
fingers like red drips on the page.  You
are in labor, the constant ache of
creation.

You were born in the dark, celestial,
implosion.  You enter through a door;
access to the deepest recess of
experience.

Caroline Shank

Everyday I look for you.
You navigate me.  

What I am
afraid of is simple.
Will you notice me in the
millennia since then?
Will the white hair
camouflage me?

It's better if I stop looking
for your red curls
along the sidewalks
of my past.

I am going to go to the
god of past bells to stop
the ringing of your name.
I will have no luck there
but I will try to get to
tomorrow without you.

You warm me, like those
summer steps in the rain.

Caroline Shank

Sammy hides from me. He
wags his cognac tail under
the couch.  He peeks at me
through umber eyes and I melt.

Sammy runs around my feet,
careful not to trip me up.
He's not interested in my tears
but watches carefully to see
if he deserves a treat.

He wants the treat from me alone.  Sammy pants from
below and I tease him.  He
likes the challenge for a moment.

Sammy comes when I call
him.  He knows my smell.
I promise not to get another
amber colored puppy licking
my fingers for more. Always
more.

Sammy doesn't know my
heart.  He just dances for
his supper.

Caroline Shank

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Caroline Shank
1.25.22

We walked together not saying
a word.  It was Summer, the
lake was blue and we held hands.  
Not so unusual you might say.

The city was behind us then.
Tall buildings of wind washed
brown and gray lined the
streets.  You looked
at me gently folding.

I asked for one more day.  
We spent the last of
time quietly.  Tomorrow would
not be there for us.  We return
to the hologram of ourselves.
Long goodbyes, unheard chimes
of weddings that were not ours.

I mean, so much of the lives of
others are meant for each of us.
I bend my head against the wind
and whisper these words,

I live
always,
you.


Caroline Shank

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

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

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

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

The soft song lasting
in amber grained wood.  

Your words there
on my kissed lips.

The perennial intimacy
in the upstairs room you
slept in.

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

This dance is forever.


Caroline Shank

My children were the mothers of my soul.
Each of them took me to places I had
never been.

When they were babies I learned
through trials the fears that croup
doesn't **** a 3 month old,
that my daughter wore Holly Hobby
and never told me she hated it.

I learned the Sears catalogue by
heart and always bought the 3 pack
of whatever they had on sale.
They never complained.

I was amazed that my daughter
spent her only 50.cents on an
owl for my collection.  Ruby lives
with me today.

They were mine until they
started school.  Then they
we're feral.  

My stretch marks crawl across me
like fuscia rivulets.  I have
left the itch of them behind.

I am a grandmother to strangers.
A mother to voles.  I bred
them out like songs I can no longer

hear.

Caroline Shank

(A portrait of a Lady
brushed across time.
A fragment of life one
afternoon in a poem.)

She drops through your
memory like music from
a farther room.  Her death
is filtered.  Colors
are flowers on the grass.

You are a prism or a vessel.
You come and go.
Time goes into stone.
Pain is a fossil.  It will
be here a billion years.


Caroline Shank

The cinders under my bare feet
jabbed me in my hurry to the
beach.  The path down from
the street to Silver Lake was
short but painful.  I rushed
running to the shore.

I learned to swim from a wonderful
lifeguard.  From 1st to 2nd to 3rd
rock I spent the summer of my 10th year swimming in the freezing
spring fed lake.

I swam flat out like a fish.  
I listened for his whistle under
water.  Come up,  he summoned me to the top.  I shimmered like a
shook trout in my rainbow eagerness.

I was a pebble unknowing
that my fate washed me up on
the shore
the day I felt the first young
flung feelings of love.

I shot through the ends of
latency like a star.
I never felt it ringing.



Caroline Shank

Hard to remember the events
of a life so differently lived.
So short a time, barely cut the
grass.  She was fabulous for
half a summer.  Like a lady
in a perfect hat.  She was
glossy.

For half a summer.

Her voice cleared.  Her body
flew about the air like a breeze.
Music played constantly.  Her
humming a decible over the
bees.  She sang.  She dripped
over the sunlight like honey.

When he left she became
wax.  Her life melted in the
rain.

Twenty seven gone to
long.  She wished, her
whole life, to be twenty
six forever.

Still she sits.  
Uncomprehending
Looks for the wet
where she opens her face.

Just walking nowhere,
Bound for a song
she hears daily.
Her tattered memory
drops with every step.

Caroline Shank

Some things are tough.

Some roads are rough.

Some horses are rode

hard and some are

put down wet.


Some lives succeed.

Some lives don't.

Some people strive.

Some people won't.


Some people give up.

Some people slow down.

Some people love.

Some people don't.


Some say the sky is blue.

Some see the colored hue.

I saw Heaven beyond the pale.

clouds, and I saw you.


I saw you in Paradise.

I saw in each other's 

eyes love

in your rainbowed arms. 



Caroline Shank

We met in the early days of the planet.
I remember the radical color of your
amber hair.  There were curls there
that only the gods made.

I remember you.  I loved the simple
act of breathing your name.  Prehistory
awakened in me the sovereign blessing
of your inimitable love.

I remember you, do you remember me?
Someday you will be here again and
we will know the depth of the night,
the height of the day and the
remembered purr of our bodies.

I wait here on the divan of day.
You will breathe my air again.

I wait.


Caroline Shank

For us it was pure recreation, the
flap ends of days at work
We saw the night sky lighten to
the moon’s yellowed ends.

Our signals were these - -
the free
formed contacts of those who
worked in the dark.

Every time thru touch we
exolored the tiny motions,
the fingertip braille of meanings.

Then the scattered
motions slung across
the disarray-
the darkness of
lamps shutting off,

of
beds silenced, sheets
unmoved

ever again.

Not to return uncovered the
indifference, the mistaken
edges of a vocabulary grown
only
in my carved thoughts.

Feeling  blurred into
the dim haze of

indifference.

Touch

slid

away.



Caroline Shank
2.29.2024

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 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.


Wednesday, September 26, 2001


Written over 20 years ago  interesting in light of my evolution

It was in the early spring, as
I was just waking up, I realized
that the day had lost its colors
and I was blinded by the loss.

There were shades of gray,
many tones of dun and some
paler lights where sunlight
tried to pierce my eyes, to
no avail.

I mentioned this to you as I
turned to face the empty pillow.
You were gone and nothing
I could do would bring you
and the pallet of colors
settling back in place.

I walk the city streets
unidentified.  I am unseen
in my gray dress.  There may
be activity but there is no
sound.  I float like a ghost
past your house.   I remember
when we lived there, before
the catastrophe.  

You asked me if I loved
you and I, rendered mute
by the enormity of your
request, could not mumble,
though I longed to shout
YES YES YES.  You took
me for a fool in my unthroated
response.  I became a ghost
then doomed to walk the
city's streets, a ghost of
unforgiven silence.

There is no one at home
today.  I lie supine in
my sorrow, in the bleak
gray, and all my tomorrows
crawl flatly to my grave.

Oh do not be tricked and
think me abused for my
vocabulary.  But think
of me unbounded by
the light.  Extinguished
by the loss of a sentence.


Caroline Shank

Caught between spaces, faces

fraught with beginnings and end-

ings look backward, look forward.

At our age we spin.  The dance

of light is uncertain.  There

are shadows.  Perspective lies

just this side of the line

between the still world and

the moving.  We approach 

possibilities with prismatic

elegance.


More certainly we move across

the floor, scatter and are caught

up in the skirts of mornings,

afternoons, evenings.  Free for

the first time we shed our skin

in anticipation.  Old age is

a filled stream.


The echoes of childhood, the rasp

of youth are replaced by a certain

smoothness.  We go forward because

some thing turns us like a level

in space, always that way.  We go into

our children’s maturity, wrestle with

the presumptions of our age, and slide

like something iced into

something waiting.

I'm going now,
you can call me
at the number
here.

I am one with the
once me never
again remembered.

I'm the mother, the
grandmother and
the, now, widow.

Whoever said i should
give thanks left no
calling card.

No hello, no goodbye,.

Buddha, he of no
regrets, spent his
life ignoring the pain

of even the women.

He did not say give
thanks, he said be
still.  For eight
years he sat.

Christ said He was
not of this world, so
no wisdom from
the Christian Miracle
of the World.  He is not
talking to me now.

The Rabbi stays alone
In a Shtetl, or however
it is spelled.

I lived sans companion,
no being to give me
permission to inhabit
this or any body.

My music
was lost. I played songs
over your name.
I dont know what
that means
My love.

I  lay in
this tangle of
placques
and convolutions

on the grass
of your words.

You tell me
now

that love always

was your

Song.



Caroline Shank
11.8.2024

I cried when Rozy died.  Great
clutches of gulps.  The next two
deaths left me undone.  No tears
left in my account.  We are all
but flashes of light by Buddha.
We are bubbles in a summer
sky.

I have used up my allotment
of sorrows and the emptiness
of my soul is deep and quiet.
Hear fellow wanderers you are
not alone.

Among the stands of people
whose silence is felt to be
flannel resolution I am to tell
you to wait for sorrows too
incredible to be bourne.
You are in the company of
dryness, of desolation.

God will send you to your
knees in the Great Relief
of terrible sorrow.  Then
you will begin again.  You
will be safe, inevitably, in
the silence and quiet
contemplation that those of
us who have passed dispair
find in every day things.  

Then death Will Have No
Dominion and tears WILL
flow and water your fertile
communion.

And I? I sit alone
and quietly
reflect.  


Caroline Shank

We dug with bare hands
each to the other.  Sifting
minutes into memory,
language into clover.

We spread our hands
gave life a chance and
the Universe said Yes.

We haven't changed a
minute.  We share the
telepathy of souls,
the candles of passion.

Tomorrows infinite,
reaching into each
other,

roots entwined.


Caroline Shank

Now travels with me like skin.
It's always there.  I can't feel
yesterday.  But I remember.

I remember lp records and
playrooms for the kids.  Me.
I remember Mrs Cleaver
and Donna Reed.
Father knew best.

Make out parties.  Devil
or Angel.  Slow dancing.
Egg creams and cigarettes
at thirteen were a quarter
a pack.

Football. First in ten do it
again.  Cheers and jeers.

The lake behind the school
where we met to go to
the drag races.

Dancing at First **** on
Saturday nights.  The Dog,
The Bird, of course the
Twist.  

Bobby socks,poodle skirts
and crinoline,
boys in in pink and gray.  
Fads.

Getting my driver's license.
Big Boy and Bonnie Doon's
Driving the packed streets
in and out through the
circuit.  All kids all night.

Sleepovers and 35 cent
movies.

But I digress.  Now is
creaks and coughs.  Today
is viewed through rheumy
eyes.  

Now is like walking through
air dragging memory and
tomorrow's shopping lists.

That really is All There Is,
My Friend, said Mae
West I think.  If I can
remember.

Caroline Shank

I have known you already, known
your voice in the songs of other
men.  Our history is in
ancient dreams.
We danced during
the nights of music.

I have seen you across
lamplit streets, haloed by fog.  We meet at the annointed
moment when dreams divest themselves
of surer things. Chase through
time memories in a golden cup.

I have tasted you already, the salt
skin sweat under my lips.  Kisses
during a drumbeat.  Sounds
unceasing.  

A toast
whispers to the real world.


Caroline Shank

Karma brought me here.
I meditated long enough
to realize the sun beyond
the gloom.
I found in the **** heaps of
a life only crippled a piece
of light.

Karma is a whisper.
caught and warm.
It is the song
through which I dance.


Caroline Shank

Would you choose to deny
me?  I can't breathe.  I am
filled with love for my family,
for God.  I am only old.
You will be too, you who
would triage my life out.

I contribute to my family.
I dig with both of the
hands God gave me in
the soil and grow beautiful
things.  I am flower fresh.

I am not broken.  No one
is broken.  You who think
you can save the life of
a younger person.  

Save Me.

I could be your mother.
Save her.  When you
make a choice remember
I was here first.  The Universe
is Random.  Tilt your
thought to  philosophy.

I have miles to go before
I sleep.  If you choose
the old ones, the infirm,
the besotted the young

Will remember you also

In

Time.


Caroline Shank


Prompt: the ethics of
triaging ventilators.

My soul must be reincarnate.

Once upon a time, to wit,
in the past,  l was a
prisoner of lost love’s
leer.

Time was
A gun shot through my
dreams.

Yet still i love.

Again.

Love once
collapsed.

You called me.

My smile

unwrinkled.



Caroline Shank
11.8.2024
.

You’ve spilled like sun on my
shoulders, like light through
a glass. Your face is in front
of me as I write.

I break through.
You are the weather
in which I have grown
so green.

The poems are fertile
vines growing out
through open windows.

You know me better
than I know
how to be.

Caroline Shank