It's the end of another day.  Goodnight Moon.
The sun is gone now and it runs away
from me.  Hello long hours of Sturm
and Drang.  I don't sleep until, drugged,
I stumble into dreams.

I no longer dream of you.  I dream of
the deaths of friends.  I count them.
Some are pebbles, some are rocks.

I trip into my waking hours like a
Redwood falls in the forest.  I walk
forward with a limp.  

I no longer dream of you.
I save sleep
for unimportant things.

Tonight is a blank sky.
It is tears dammed by floats
of lost time.  Unrecoverable
time.

Are you still
softly singing

"Sweet Caroline"  

to the dark horizon.  🎼 🎶?



Caroline Shank

The archaic symbols of the dream
appear nightly stained on some
gigantic scrim.  There’s a battle
going on in one corner, a damsel
is at stake of course; her favors
his reward.  Somewhere else is a
monkey holding a tin cup and
pant-hooting at passers by.
There will be some trouble if he
doesn’t get his pennies.  More
I suppose if he does.

A man and a woman face each other;
she prepares bandages for his war.
The problem is she can’t reach the
victims he piles up.

Birds fly, horses fly, lizards slither
out of holes each with pieces of’
paper fluttering from their mouths.
The paper disappears leaving only
sockets without sound.

The dream is incomplete without the man,
standing still in the middle, his spear
pointed up.  He cannot move
and the tears on his face
are children.



11/11/80


CSS publications 2nd place winner 8/84  $25.00

Lie To Me 2021

2020 leaves with the devil
whipping it on. But it's not going anywhere.  It is full of sound and fury.  

We scroll through the signs.
We think we will enter into
time's free zone. There are no
promises. Death drapes
from the sky.

Time past and time future
are only pages and lyrics
sung from one year into the next.
We will all cancel hope
by March.

I hear the witches chanting,
"By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes."


Caroline Shank


Notes:
The Four Quartets
Macbeth
Faulkner

The Dead


They waft through.
The end brushes their faces.
Reminiscent of
leaves blown against
vegetable skin.  The
landscape soaks with,
saturates with, this
growing out of season.  
Weeds rise from the inside,
and like vines, scale interior
walls, crumble stone, hiding
in the cracks while rooting
for the breast of destruction.


Lives are spread out.
Spilled flowers, and at
the last it all lay written
across the years when the
pulsing, fecund ending, still
in pieces was unfolding
in the weeds.


You don’t know nuthin’ folks.
They wait like children who
know exactly when to get into
locked gardens the mothers
left for a minute for
groceries or shopping, for
a cocktail, meaning to return,
only to linger over the
afternoon.

If you gasp folks in the
second before reality finds
you counting your blessings,
you never looked them in
the face, never saw the
wind part the sky in front
of them, never touched the
ivy stuffing the holes,
where the sadness milks into.


Go home, the dead have
already bloomed.  You can’t
find them in the landscape
of their ends if you have
to ask.  You never knew that
Death which, on the ground,

blows around our faces.


Waits.







5. 14.92

Revised 7.25.24

Beloit Poetry Journal  rejected 7/14/91
The Limberlost Review rejected 8/15/92
The Little Magazine rejected 1/23/93

Neitzche said we are doomed

to live each life over and over

again exactly the same way.


I differ.  Our lives of flowers

and yes, of nails and pain

will live once in the pocket

of the Universe unshed of

all memory.


Tomorrow is not predictable.

We shovel today's minutes into

the jeans and skirts, the

pockets of yesterday.


We are trialing this day and

have not yet decided 

what to tell, and what to bury

under the rocks, the shales, 

of memory.


We will not recur 

but we will live on

together

forever.



Caroline Shank

At what point do I cross over
to the unknown spaces?
Fires carve.  Smoke
marks the places of memory.

"Beyond this point there be
dragons."  

I run to the flat humid
edge of the world.
Under my feet is lava.  
"Is this a dream? "
I ask the lone
sparrow.

"Hurry" he said "Run
before
the wind loosens your
madness."

There is no room to
sit in this desolate
geography.  I am bound
to the edge with laces.

Call the naked lion.
Retrieve for me
the last vestige of sanity.
The remnants of sensation.

I remain alone on the
precipice of thought.
Find me, if you can,
amid the char and
debris of your last

goodbye.  


Caroline Shank

You were always on the edge
of someone's disaster Mikey.
You sailed through days
with no wind.
Swam when the boat tipped,
sailed alone when it didn't.

You needed wings to soar above,
a paddle to stay upright.
You did not trust the water,
the air, the shore, the fire.

You were upside down,
you lost the rope.
you cut loose.

You are nobody's
adventure now.

Not even the rain.

Caroline Shank

I’ve said it now, twice;
I’ll be dead by Thanksgiving.
November is the cruelest month.
That’s when it happened to you
Ma.  You left with the harvest,
reaped by the devil cells
bearing their fruit in your
bloated throat.

You fell to the floor, rotten
from having hung too long
in your ***** cellar.

I wish you’d died in
But no, you waited
to see me grown, my own
body breeding your foul
flowers.

Now I am broken in my stem
and unpollinated in my mind.
I wait for some death
(I’ll take any) and inch
by inch boredom chokes me.

I cannot outlast this harvest.
I’ll die before you did
with both ******* on
and sober.


Caroline Shank

Long ago, miles and miles
ago,  you'd think I'd have
forgotten.  I remember so
many things.

I've learned that a tree down
still remembers its first leaf.
That the moon remembers
its first sunset.  I've learned
to understand then, that the
first beating of your
existence on my heart
remembers you.

Send me a signal that I
may see the first fragments
of your hand in mine,
the first dance in the
dark, the first look
we knew as always.

Let me not go without
one signal that you knew,
once, the colors of my
name you whispered
on my skin that night
you said goodbye.

The years have frailed me,
but not so much that I
could not relive that
sole and singular summer.

Caroline Shank

I found the end where I thought
it was too soon. The vestigal
wrapping of time is in the
dance.  The Nun’s habits
rustle.

There is dust in his eyes.
The sun is blotted out.
My mistaken opinion
forsakes him.

The dish of songs in my
late nights repertoire is
only food for the
neighbor's cat

I am hearing him
Pipe. The trembling
of my heart

Is the only sssooo
uuunnndd.

Caroline Shank
6.12.2024

I am an American woman.
Rough and oddly strange.
I rebel against Dandelions,
I celebrate the omnipresent
Ladybug assault every year.

My age is irrelevant.  The
patterns in the gardens
of thought are my friends.

Some of the night’s whinning
winds wake me before
I remember you.

Time slaughters thought.
No syllables amount to
clarity of forgiveness.

I am an American woman.
I cry in private places you
know nothing about.

My God is still overseas.
In time the laws of
Harmony

will send you

also

Home.

And what will you do
with me then?

I am an American woman.
Here are my credentials…

Don't just walk on the
pages where it talks
about me.

Briefly.


Caroline Shank
Was here.
October 25, 2024

!.

I am almost 74.  I sigh as I type
that out.  I remember the first 45rpm record I ever bought.
Sonny James. "Young Love."
I played it for forever on the
old record player we had in the
basement. $.79

The sunshine of those first
moments of fiscal liberty
burned into my mind.  
It is a fleeting moment
still turning, singing
"they say for every boy and
girl"...

We all whirl in the dirndl
of time. The dances were
named then.  The slow songs
my favorite.  I have no idea
if people dance now.  What
Blue Skies and Wine and
Roses are there today to
weave the time.  

I live in a Lonesome Town,
with a dwindling number of
friends.  The only thing left
of the lovers who slow-danced
me are the grooves across
the face of a long life lived

across a jukebox of illusion.


Caroline Shank

I am tumbling downhill
like an Autumn leaf
disarranged from the
pack.  I am caught by
the wind of your disease.

I allow your sickness to
flourish in you.  I have
no choice.  Broken is
what you feel, sadness
is my experience.

I am crisp with failure.
A small dry vein
along the tip of today,
I owe you my apology.
You have not earned
it.  But still I cry.

You, who do not see
me, cannot capture the
desiccation of my
soul.


Caroline Shank

Time Chimes

I call to you
from out the mullioned
window on the back
of my house.

Windows open to recent rains.  I feel the
soft air of yesterday before the crepuscular
failure of today. (I know, you hate that word,
crepuscular. You hate a lot of words.)

The last light of day lay like velvet
on my doorstep. A signal
to shake the lace curtains.
Wave to far years gone to
other lovers.  The vibrations
on my skin reminds me of you.  I am
old now.  These are memories of
when we were young and tan
and satisfied with a bed and a beer
and a joint shared in the upstairs room.
Now curtains slow as my breathing
slows.  I am comfortable in my
old chair here by the light.  The
mewling of feral kittens is music
enough.  

Night surrounds me.
The ocean is my song.
I am completed in my time.
You, my muse, are aware of
my souls quiet caring. The
sun sets where once we saw the
sky with blue eyes and shooting
stars.  Our destiny is a psalm
to missed timing and unlit
cigarettes.  

Hear me in your deafness
calling on the memories we
made like Michaelangelo.

Art is never a vehicle for
humans last only a
minute.

Time chimes in the
downstairs room
and I sing to myself.

Caroline Shank
2.1.22

Now what? You might well

ask. After the halcyon days

in Florida? After the debt

of childbearing?  After the

years of budgets?  Now what?


Back in the cold, the kids

grown, the still unsettled

finances?  I'm old and faded.


What happens to this

country song that is 

my life?  I am going to 

dance.  Still hold out my 

card to you.


The dance we have left

is slower, but the music

still travels up my spine.

Yes that's what.  I 

save the last dance

for you. 


It's just the way I roll.


Caroline Shank

1.2.20

She could not abide the
accolades.  Every syllable
scratch and poked through
her.  Layer after layer the
thorns of praise tore her

until one day she stowed
stones in her pockets.
She walked along the
side of the water, not
thinking now, not even
the recitation of reasons.

Thousands of words
behind her and she
did not think they
mattered.  She walked
along the bank and
gathered pieces of
granite.  She hoarded
these like treasures

until she had enough.
The first step was
cold but unnoticed.

She walked into her
death like a nun who
no longer feared the
confessional.

Her hair floated around her
like seaweed, fingers
like fish.  She stopped
the flowers of language

until there were no
more petals.  She died
consumed by a
brownness welcomed
after the lighthouse
darkened.

Mrs Dalloway
never gladly held
another day.


Caroline Shank

the candles are lit
the wisemen travel abroad
I bow to midnight

The desert is cold
this December night across
the moon's path to Him

there is joy in the
air the angels sing out loud
sing a choir breathing

thank the Lord of my
salvation.  I have little
to give the one I love.

but He has raised my
heart to His acknowledge
He will be here soon.

three men arrive at
a stable door with gifts for
the Son of God cries

out loud love will win
and I am handed the night
the whole world rejoiced


Caroline Shank

I don't have anything to hold
you to me.  No picture or voice.
Do not go, but turn
if you feel the draft of your
name brush against you.
Know that it is I who sent it.  

I am a listener these days.
Listening for your voice
that called my name.

I do not publish you but
gently unscroll the days,
those summer days, so
short, when you said

forever.


Caroline Shank

Time eclipsed.
The hours
dose the day.
I am ungood at social
graces.

For what are we to do?
Knowing this?

Apologies skip stones
across thought. I drown
in regret. I am older
not better.

I chase all the live-long
day, calm the tired
minutes
Frown the ridiculous
heart.

But,

I bloom for you.

Caroline Shank

Our Song


Narcissist that I am the
last quarter of my life is

filled
with you.

The dark
is my friend.

Old age
recapitulates
loneliness.
Life
is
slow dance .

I digress

Wrinkles and craters
belong to the
years of
oil and cigarettes.

I never knew you were
on the way.

Now time's ******* o
surfaces

The seaglass fractures
light
in the Son

There is a destiny
unclasped in the

Light.

You lead  me
in this

our

Song


Caroline Shank
9.17.2024


For Jack
9.17.2024
Song.

You are the wind.
You are the words.

Down in the hollows of
my throat you are
the songs I hum.

Your growl sounds
take me out of me.

Lay me down.
Ta dumm

Strum me.

I am the riff from
your guitar..
Play me now.  

Turn up the radio.
"It's been a long long
time."

"Play me."


Caroline Shank


Conway and Neil
and me.

Reflections
Those whose singular licks
of love grow aged and
Holy in the light of old
memories,


whose hands trace
lines on her body
in the grooves and
branches of the


forgotten, laden
with the names of
the unborn possibilities
call me in the night.


I am the listener who
Never sleeps.
I have my own stories
which trouble my pen
to widen the nights


of loss, you, and the
dreams of my


Old


Age






Caroline Shank
11.1.2024

Did you see the one about the
serial killer?  Or the making of
Die Hard?

Laying back in my chair the TV
drones on.  The world as I
know it spins out of control.

It's going to be a landscape
of empty restaurants and
breadlines.  Of bad hair
and toilet paper.

Don't feel safe in the
tribulation.  A white horse
is about to wait at your
locked gate.
.

Caroline Shank

Don't lead me down that path.
That trodden split concrete lump
of sameness you called your
love.  I've tripped before on
that sidewalk of belief.  

Don't place my hand over your
sorry song.  The beat is slack,
the rhythm is tired. I have heard
more poems in Heaven and Earth
than are imagined in
your philosophy Horatio.

Walk off the curb where no
fence is.  There you will
find your blind way.  Don't
grasp for daisies

when you find the end of the
journey.  You will trip
on the  lines I draw
with chalk made of
tears and dust.

Caroline Shank

God doesn't make mistakes. If we listen. Forgiveness is a flower. It only blooms in our singular embrace

Caroline Shank
7.6.2024

Pandemic


Time folds into itself like a
hand wraps around its own
fingers.   Minutes go into
seconds, the reverse of
times own practicality.

I waver between the worlds
of sleep and starking
wakefulness.  I move
during the disconnections
of place and action.

I will arrive, as Eliot said,
at a place of beginning.
Not to recognize my
neighbor is a conclusion
forgone as the inversion
of time depletes me.

This is sacred time
ordained by nature.
I thrive or succumb
and in the end I will
be very different.

I morph as the virus
spreads nature.
That time will end for
me is its only goal.

The pandemic is
unbleached.  I
sacrifice myself
to the gods of
unknowing.

Caroline Shank


Prompt:. Covid-19

So it all ends not with a
bang but

With

A

# *******

Whimper.

Sad night's in prayer.
Shriven of guilt.
On the freshly vacuumed
Floor.

Not the sounds of sad
crying but the whoosh
of stifled prayers

Of course. Penance
For crossed lines
In the ashfalt of
propriety.

Lord I know not

What

I have

Done.

Posters say travel.
I will crumple my
Not so sea-worth
weighted with
Soul. .

Whisper

Will you still
love me

Tomorrow.?


Caroline Shank
07.10.2024

Reflections on a Wednesday
              Afternoon
  
While waiting for an appointment,
I am **** bench numb uncomfortable.
I glimpse the yellow corn fields
out of the window…

I am sixteen.  The Autumn
of my last New York year.

Oh no, I am not dead like
the girl in the book I read.

I'm old and my youth
touches me.  I no longer
jump like a girl, but i
observe.

The traps and snares of
memory, alive among the
detritus of those years
dump into my basket
like fishy Fridays.  

We had a cat as
white and feral as
lightning. She would
lick the Friday platter.
We worried about the
bones.

But I digress.

The corn leans in, a
deliberate stretch
to hear the sounds I
left

I was a child of the 50s.
So long ago.  

The memories
are squashed

by the army
of commuters

who always
smote my

songs.


Caroline Shank

Beware the stranger at your door.
The tissue voice of magic,
the tight handshake.

The seduction of your senses,
good words can lie.

Arrive at a place of softness,
the betrayal of surprise.

Stubborn denial, voices
enlarge the deceit.
You are not safe
when softness hides
the stone of treachery.


Caroline Shank

She does not have regrets.

She dodges them.  She turns

herself around, 

sits upside down.


Elle n'a pas de regrets.

As Edith might say.


She has eruptions,

trembling hands.

headaches, sweat stains.


She occasionally pretends 

she is full of  joy. She pays 

for the coins.  


Somewhere in the

night images dance,

they sing.  She wakes to


sorrow that another day 

arrives.  


She is just a pedestrian.

who shares an occasional

joy with strangers

who love her.


She paints regret

with a smile.


Caroline Shank

There you go again
scaling the walls of
my scarred and forked
emotions.  I cover the
limbs which you have
not as yet noticed.

I hear you chanting.
I shiver as you dance
around the soft underbelly
of yesterday.

If I could tell you that
which I know to be
true would you stop
your blue colored cry
to be love touched?

Could we but begin the
music again?  I don't know
what the years of our separation will bring, I only know
that we are soft
sound on skin.

Tango me esta noche.


Caroline Shank

this:  a round frame, a seascape,
no one is there.  A Sting Ray
burroughs in wet sand. Three
gulls fly low over the shore.

The oils display the sky over
the scene in shades of
blue, yellow and pink.

The wind howls across
the dunes and the seabirds
screech.  Hear them.
in the wayback. See the
sun struggle with the oils
for just a little space on
the canvas

Colors hang on a cancer
patient's hospital wall.
He sees the spread of
colors through the
morphine.  It is for
him a movement in
between the waves
where the relentless
pain remains.


Caroline Shank

The curtains hang over widows that have not been opened
for years.

I am scared to raise the yellowed
shade.  Behind the grime of ages the half rolled up crackling
fabric has tales to tell.

Yesterday is gone, tomorrow
may not fall from the transom.
I am aware of this other space
above the dust and mouse
droppings on the sills of
yesterday.

If you ever come here again
you will find the splats where
my tears have spilled.  The
view from the second floor
window is distorted by my
sad eyes.  

I will be near, ever near, to
you here in this place of
memories where once we
swayed to music
from another room.

It was all so long ago when
we were young and dancing
to the sounds of
unrequited love.

Open your eyes.
I am standing by the window
abandoned to the rains.
The streaks of your young
face never fade no matter
the years.

The shade remains in place.
My thoughts steam
on the ***** glass.
My breath never distorts
the singular mission to
redeem the past.

If you return here you will
find me dreaming
alone by the marks
of yesterday.


Caroline Shank

Sometimes

Sometimes I just sit. Wading
thru thoughts.  The cells
of my future
capture
the nonloves of mythical
proportion

I have clocks all over
the walls.  We tic
together.
White sheet rock,
flat line.  Everyone’s
story is coded in the
cells.

The walls are
dry. I see names
Scri+++ names.
Thought comes and
GOs.

Tomorrow will slide over
me in an ecstasy of

feeding.

I will sit and count the
days until my sorry

***

goes….. .



Caroline Shank
7.17.2024

I am Pandora. I have let everything escape.  My days are filled with searching. Mostly I look for you.

I can't gather the misguided
objects which surround me now. I
need to fight for the mountain
tops and silver lakes I knew
when we were young.

Are you still among the reeds
and shells of lost nights and
trodden days.  Memories dip
around me.

Say it isn't so, that you have
shorn your curls, pantsed your
youth and wiped the shy
calendar on the grass where
we talked into the night.

I try to return hope to the
broken  container but
it cuts my hands.  The
contents dive at me
like yellow birds in
a banana tree,

I am alone among the
troubles.  I am wrapped
in the moods of
silence.

I curve around the center,
gather your image
in my graying
locks.

Caroline Shank

Happy Birthday

My son is brave, kind
and good.

He slid into the light,
caught by uncertainty.
Out of the Dim and
Quiet he marched the
one thousand days.

Mute mother and crying.
Exhaustion.
Life was always in the
next room.

My son reached for the
barre of imagination.,
Cries of indignation.
The room reverbated.

Music of my youth in
his mouth. He ******
the flowers.  The walls

folded around him in
a swaddlle embrace.

Lordy lord the past of
my anthology cries.

Birthday is to Kevin
as life is joy to me.


Caroline Shank
7.19.2024

Let me go Lord.
Save my memories in an old
coffee can. Tie it with string.
Give my bed to a homeless
woman who hasn't reached
the turning.

Take the white out of my hair,
and take my blue eyes too.
I have seen pain's
kaleidoscope. And
I was afraid.

Return what tenderness
survives to the flowers
lest I wilt them with
careless whispers.

Take me out of church
before the offertory.

Scatter the ashes of
a life sorely led on the
edge of the pond where
memories, like
sargassum, trap me.

Bring to me a dram of
whiskey.  Mix it with
the remains of my
life's last call.

Time Gentlemen.

My song is done.
Let me go Lord.
I am an image
wrapped in
Saturday.
.


Caroline Shank

Why, when I need sanity most,
do I find confusion
surfacing around me.

Tell me you love or tell me you
don't.  Speak plainly, without rancor
or condescension.  For
Heaven's sake quit
confounding me with erudition.

You know enough
the way to get in
touch with the skin
of meaning.  

Rub me on my fingertips.
Feel my heartbeats.
I feel you in the cradle of my
old age.

Lead me not into temptation.
But deliver me from confusion.
forever and ever.

Amen

Caroline Shank

Do you remember the rain?
You were soaked and the
only thing you heard was
my voice crying in the
wildness of that starless
night.

Later you were so calm.  
I was in a void,
medicated to save
my life.  We saw
each other across
the cigarettes of
scarred conversation.

Do you remember
your hands on my face?

Personne ne se souvient

Is it too much, this drought
of time? These long misted
years clutch the past
like a pout of pain.



Caroline Shank

The lamp is lit, the day undercover.
I wonder where you are?  In my chair,
in my room, on the sidewalk.  I think
I will never see you.  Your face
in the lamplight mirrors the summer
night I called but you never came.

I sit under the light of the lamp
I ponder on my hands.  I held
you beyond understanding.

I promised not to hurt you.
I failed.  I heard myself
cry on the beach we shared
once and briefly.

My eyes are closing. The
light has long ago gone out.

Caroline Shank

You can't reverse the dying
of a leaf. Even if it is not fully
in the ripeness of its demise.

The yellow stripe of incipient
decay that rides the center
of the foliage is only the
beginning.  The curled
edges follow and if there
is a flower it will float down
very shortly.

Love like death takes
its time with all things.  
Toes and fingers curl in a semblance of sadness.  
The veins break
like old thread.  

Both leave in their own season,
in short gasps.  The last thing
to go is the stem. The *******
resonance of a long goodbye.

It rejects the unction
of extreme prayers
left on the
knuckle of loss.


Caroline Shank

Your epiphany renders my life
mute.  You walk through a
cloud of happiness I cannot
share.

I don't want the remnants of
your friendship.  I pick through
your past digging for you.
You left me alone and I can't
dance to our song today.

Life was wrong to plant your
belongings in my torn house.

I will forever disremember you
as if you were a song I never
understood.  You are ephemeral
as smoke on glass.  The sun
no longer streams from you.


Caroline Shank

I want a new literature, something
closer, before the white froth of
language spreads itself on the
sand.  A new book to read, a
clean beach over the world of
my youth.  My mother burrows in
shallow ground, is a bird pecking
its way out.  She drapes herself
in feathers.

I need a new literature.  Something
to hold above the wound where she
rips in and out of me like a
door. A new book to lay over an
old story.

I sift through the silt of this
shore where my world is
dug up with tin spoons.  I grow
old in the quiet of my age,
hear the sound of freedom, see
the last tears run into the
ocean of my regrets.


Caroline Shank

Now you are there where
the time turns out to be a
mixture of fear and joy.  
You live between the lines
and spaces of my mind.

We root for all the people
left on the battlefields
of this ****** war
on which we will either
sacrifice or lose to make
the last days of memory
and the dance of the day
our hymn to the silent
future.

We suffer, you and I, the
days of darkness and
strange things that are
coming at us like leaves
twisting off the trees.  We
arrange ourselves between
the dates that crawl from
the calendars. You say
we are going to get, in
the last days of autumn,
the first rays of Spring.

When I Think of you
I pray.

Caroline Shank

Run with me Sammy
Hold onto the trails of
imagination. I love 
your touch.
You pour through
the branches of my life
like sunbeams through
cognac.

Caroline Shank

Kyrie Eleison

on my old and fractured
existence. May I be
released from the slavery
of old loves that pit me, that
pock me with the dregs
of all those memories.

Christe Eleison

on my ignorance.  You
who loves as the birds fly,
wildly propogating life from the
grasses between the sidewalks.

Kyrie Eleison

on me as I find the way
home away from the dome
of my misgivings.
Make me a potion, carry
me for Your refraction.

I hold onto pain as a
refusal to my remolding
soul.  Model me to an
abundance of joy.

Caroline Shank

When I die I want to be
in love with you.
I want to take with me
your tender care.  I don't

want to leave you without
you knowing that a large
piece of the fabric

of me

was you.

I want to experience

you,

the breathless catch
which surprises me
everytime I think

of you.

The thought under the song
of you loving me   The words
of prayers, in so many
languages.  We were
Blessed to know that
love was our predestined

Minute.

We for whom God planned,
in the beginning, a banquet
of days.  Not years.

When I die I want to take
your voice breathing
our names,

over and over again.

          God give us a lifetime,

          for a minute.

         You and me.

         A prayer

         Returned.




Caroline Shank
10.8.2024

Love melts like chocolate on a face
on a hot Summer day.  You can't
capture it because it drains down
your lips to tomorrow.  

Love falls to the ground and colors
the grass a burnt orange.  The color
of my  heart when you left me
without sound.  

Words unsaid smear.  
Unrecoverable sounds of
midnight kisses elude.

Love remains in me,
before you ever left.

How do I say goodbye
to nothing in my hands?
The silence of
your leaving drips
as you
melt away.


Caroline Shank

I will kiss you last before
I shuffle off, though you
will not know it.
I write your name
with a cloud's bent rod.

You will not know me,
old and fat, but I
owe you an engraved
allegiance.

You left in the rain.  And I,
I ran home to bare my
pain on the palm side of
tomorrow.  Always you,
young and warm. Still
my old heart beats
with your

goodbye.


Caroline Shank
11.1.20

The music plays

on down the years.  


Her tears fall

run


a weep of 

years sweep


eras


written on pages

old memories


the stationery bold

with sorrow.


He loved her not

to lose her but


he never knew

the mind around


her prayer


for his memories 

refrain.


Her songs


are blowing 


spores


to the wind.




Caroline Shank