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

To my toes.  To the tap tap
tapping of my toes.   I beat to the
rhythm of Willie and Conway.
I don't look like Dolly but
I know she knows me.

My moods swing to the bars
and guitars.  I am under the
swing of stars looking for
the song under the melody.

I want you Loving me Was Easier
than Anything you have Ever
Done Before. I want you to
Lay Me Down.  I Will Always
Love You.

Country music sings to my longing
for you to whom I come with
my strings on a song. I stand
here, tears fall, longing for you
to come and take me to the
limit.

Dance with me.  Swing me around
the moon.  Believe in me.  I am
the first it was to call you to
the floor. I am your Slow Hand.

Caroline Shank

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.

COVID

I am thrown pieces of virus's
scalding puke that took me
down into the warehouse
of lost memory.

My head shakes for the tears
which pour from hollowed eyes
the lack of simple names,
numbers and the wrinkled
lists of my failures.

I am overthrown by my own
mystery.  My long list of
minutiae trips me.  I am
unconscious.  Nothing
that is me is the cling on
that is all I have or am.

Covid rakes my mind taking
with with it the night in the
hospital.   The nurse who,
I am told, joined me when
her tasks allowed.

It is too much  To be so
erased until you have to call
the bank and plead for your
self in the numbers behind
the buttons which charge
our lives with permissions.

I sent my self on a journey
to sound the deeps of my
sorry mind.  I cannot know
the contents I do not know.

I am forced into redundancy.
I repeat names
of people and things I cannot
hold. There is no place at the
table where I presided before
the colorless spread of sickness
took up residence in the days
of my 75 years.

I am wiped on the arm of
illness.  I sneeze at the
passwords that are lost into
the soup of confusion.  You don't
know the shapes of the
sick citizens of my aching
head. The red blood cells
which lined up only to
fall.  

I cannot remember you. I
try to fill in the narrative
of the several weeks
weaknesses.

I am pulled ahead by
you who have loved
me.  I take the minutes
of this experience with
you my listener into
a frail future.


Caroline Shank
4.14.22

Your not so slender form stands
in the bedroom door. You yawn.
I remember you before the
drugs took you to the ends
of my life.

Old now, the reckless
times are gone. Still you try,
hanging onto the threads of
yesterday.  Tangents of
circles.  

You strive to steer your
way through the long sleep,
the crash after
the burning addiction gets
you. You climb into
tomorrow like a crawl
Into infancy

and you tell me it's all
right Mom.

Caroline Shank
1.31.2023

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,"

The moments, the Big moments
drape or twist.  I am veined.
The philodendronas years

Lead me

     here

to you.  The loud years of
babies are simple maths.

Legs and arms no longer

     wrap.

Their smooth hands patted me.

I was a queen once, in the
Nile river.  I woke up here
to mental words.

I am happy in my way
Cynara.

I send you, love, 100 years
     Of gratitude.


Caroline Shank
1.26.2024


*In my fashion”


Caroline Shank
1.26.2024

I.  She watched. Her
patience wrapped around
her like a shawl.

She saw him
touch the girl.

Then he was gone.

      II.  She will write
her poem now.
    
   III.  It is her dream.

IV.  This suggestion.
Her
imagination.

V. He arouses her

most intense

Desire.


Caroline Shank
10.22.2022

The jukebox was the only light
in the tavern.  
We were alone in the dry
recess of a lonely world.
You sang in my ear while
I swayed to your rhythm.

The song was a long low
cry.  I was urgent
in your embrace.  

I am reminded of that night
you walked away from me in
the damp laundry of dawn.

Turn around to face me,
the climate of my lonely
arms.

Hold me again to the tick
of memory so I can,
once more, dance
close to you.

Regardez moi
mon amour.




Caroline Shank

I have seen my shadow lying
on the playground of your
mind, and I was aware.

I have heard you sing my song
and I was taken.  Have you
seen me running to the beat,
beat, beat of your steps tapping
on the paths where we stopped
that day we made love in the
garden of the old house?

I'd have chased your music
into that tomorrow rain if you'd
asked.  I slipped behind the
tree to wait.  I saw you
running on the sunbeam,
down by the river, dancing
like a dandelion spore
on the breeze of evening.

I called you and you waved
your panama in the vestiges
of my dream.

Was it all imagination then?
running down my mind.
Touch me again where
you counted my pulse
leaving me breathless
in the corners of my soul.
It was a sweet dream.

If you ever find me running
toward you stay for a time.
Turn around elusive piper,
my body moves to your song.

Dance with me when I am
dreaming. Throw me a kiss in the
Summer breeze that tastes
like forever in the space
before awakening.


Caroline Shank

Dance with me, dance in the unmown grass, the gopher
holes rise edges to unseeing feet.

Dance with me, swing me over the moon on a night I will never forget, rise me to the unseen images borne to fruit in Plath.

Daddy come back is the song
played over the sky's speakers.
You only loved me.  No, no one else.  

Dance with me, waltz to the tune of my lately mother's shod torn
feet. She of the crystal heel.
Her song died in November.

Dance with me Daddy, play
your horn to the tune of stars
banged on my dead ears.

It's over, the dance of tears ended in motionless held breath.
Air of pure delight under no one's grave ended long ago.

Quite funnily, so still the
sadness of the night.


Caroline Shank

Daughter of my life you are
still so fragile.  

I wait for the phone call that
will come any minute

Someone come and help me.
I grieve for your childhood. The
weather of our lives before
storms drove me underground.

You did your head to the
storm thing. Face forward to the
landscape of your reality.

I, underground, hid your self
against me.  I rode the waves
of your addictions.

To this Winter day I have only
the remnants left of your
early years. A few pictures,
a stuffed animal named Coffee.

You cannot come back to me.
Gone are your bounce and
the hugs around my waist.
Your tears that filled my brain
with helplessness.

You are all alone in this trap
of my mind.  The madness
slips through me.. Your tears
are but dry sand.

I want no tears to your
intentional desertion.
Silence to your pleas, and
old music before you

were

born.

Caroline Shank
12.18.2022

I would have written sooner but
I was doing distaff stuff, thinking
of Portia, and getting ready to.go to
the museum of the kind I used
to love as a young woman.

So you see it's been a busy
afternoon.  I can't write
tomorrow because the trees
will be singing in Tolkeins
wartorn back garden. I will
have to endure the casualties.

I'll try to write next week when
the irons of destiny will be
warming up and I can sit for
a minute between the starry
night approaching and listening
to Beethoven's Ode to Joy.

I'm busy these days here
in my cell among the
sunflowers.

Write me back when
you are done planning
my next adventure.
I am, as always, your
own Juliette
of the Spirits.


Caroline Shank

More fool me. You named the
earth a green planet, the sky
often ten shades of punk.  You
told the Angels to leave your

scorecard at the door.

The Angel of abuse to the
Angel of love.  

Much of desire is so short
an afternoon.  

The bulls are running and they
Look to you to have

The answers


Caroline Shank
9.16.23

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

I sink into my waiting depression
as a marble into molten syrup.
My hair and face drip invisibly on the clothes of passers by.  For
how long can the strings of
sadness wind around you?

You listen to my sadnesses
but no longer hear me for
I have frayed your love like
rope in too many attempts
to tie and, having failed, lay
down to the inevitable dirge
of my unrelenting tears.

Daylight brings the last notes
of silence.  The clamor of
tasks hold me up.  The
progression to the end of
diurnal relief and I am balanced
on the truth of nightime's
faithless tones of remembering.

Caroline Shank

There is in the wind a name
so strong, so implacable as
to pass through the strongest
resistance.

There are in the sky arms so
warm they capture the prayers
of everyone.  The nuances of
language are known as a
thought blown to Heaven.

There is a star for each person
that outshines even the brightest
glow.  

Stars are born on the cusp of
love.  There is the whirl and twirl
of cosmic dust which brings
names to things.  

Your name was sprinkled on me
before the beginning of
the bang from which cosmic
destiny emerged.

It is only through the dancing
of dust that we find
each other covered in the
molecules from which
we are all born.  Through
which we will incarnate
together forever.

It is the cosmic dance, said
Maude, that "there are all
kinds of observable differences"
which makes every moment
ineffably perfect. Every encounter
unique.  We are all there ever
was or will be.  A swirl of magic
wrapped around us.  

We are all borne on the breeze.

Caroline Shank

Did I help you at all, those long
months of clawed pain?  Were
you my soul search and did I fail?

The reach beyond the cuffs of
poetry.  Did you tell me so I
would pull out of some bag of
broken metaphors
a salve for your aching limbs
swollen with unheard prayers?

You lost your balance and fell
against my sorrow.  Did you
mean to throw me out that
night you pushed all the
furniture against the door.

I ran my irritation along the
upside down days of your
disease.  The sleepless in
the living room chair was not
enough.  I took your frail limbs
to myself when you did not see.

Did you smile that ghastly smile
to scare me? Or then I did not
exist in your dementia.
I was so ill myself that I couldn't
climb the ladder of your need
anymore.

Did you die alone in that room
of helpful people and did you
see me frightened and alone?
I could not watch you in your
emptiness, your shell of lonliness.

I am still crying for the memory
is in my soul of your departure.


Caroline Shank
1.28.2023

Did you find it?
What you came
here for?  
Into this land of
broken dreams and lies
you travelled with a weary
pack lying on you like a
moldy shell.

I don't have two pence
to care
and two pence….
In other words

the scar of your
indifference
raised the

white triangle of
sad songs and
Army jingles I
learned from my
Dad.

Slide it beside me
before the effigy

Me,
In a papier mache
page Turner.

I am a member
of the caste.

Namaste

Caroline Shank
3.16.2024

It was long ago, (I know
I've told you this so often
Craig. ) in a bar, in a night of
Sirius. He wanted only to go
home.  

He left me alone in the dark rain.
My calls refracted back. I ran to
find him. There was
only my voice.

You found my life boring, (Repetition serves those who are paid. ) It
hung over me like a dripping faucet
in a lonely home where once we'd
danced.

You remember now?
You allowed me a random
philosophy
(the therapy of Jung)
where once I'd died.

I am old now, my
memories stray, so..
I will leave
long before
You miss me.


Caroline Shank

Kyrie Eleison

(Tomorrow you can drain
the swamp behind The
8th street oak and the
copulating frogs will scamper
away, two by two)

But I digress  
To be me is
always to be
alone

Christe Eleison

I am the invention of
misdirected intentions
I scream inside the
private drawer of my
Keepsakes and truffles,
hiding apostrophes.

My sole sojourn is into an
old boat I found on the
beach of my meditations,

it trespasses on the lanes of
poetry and obscenity.

Lord lay me down, I will
be always in place and silent.

Kyrie Eleison.

I am sunbent and
I Crawl


Caroline Shank
2.8.2024

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

Don't leave me alone with my
sadness, my madness.  I am
in the dark side of grieving.
Call to me from this side of

living.  Talk to me of the years
we spent collecting things which
still mount the shelves and table
tops of this place.  

Don't turn your back as you
left me that May day.  Not a
glance or a cough. Your silence
drives me. I am about to leave
you for a second.  Stay in the
chair.  

If I return and you have gone again
I will know you didn't love me
after all.  


Caroline Shank
9.29.2023

I wore blue flowers on my dress,
white flip flops on my feet.
I call this summer casual.
That was my dream. You
are not buried yet.  Soon.
I see me in the chaple
working the crowd.
Flowers in my hair.

You died on a Tuesday morning.
I was eating pizza.    I looked and
saw the flat face of death in your
beautiful eyes. You had no response.
I sat in the chair I occupied while
you were alas living.

There was no way of knowing your
deeps and shallows ebbed to the
middle of Tuesday.  There was no
more of you in my eye and I was
quiter than ever.

My dress is in the mail, my shoes
are in the closet.  I will wear blue
flowers on my dress and white  
sandals. I call this liberation.
I am released from dull gray and
the dumb dun serge you wanted
me to wear.

I sit here without tears having cried
for two months.  You are long away
and if not thinking of me you are
at last  peacefully free of trying.


Caroline Shank

She drinks more coffee now and has
found new TV shows.  The figures
have melted into blurs of color.

She misses your sweetness and
your smells.  The kiss on her
cheek, the hand on her breast.
All gone.  The times they hsve
a changed.  

Music is her companion.  Bob
Dylan sings in her bluetoothed
ear.  She thinks of you.  She sends
her lonely love thru a mask of
gauze and presses her old face
against a window.

The virus that kept you away
holds her hostage to a long
wind.

She throws
a silent kiss.

And waves
thru her tears.

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

He caught her thinking.  The
crossed legs signed
resignation.

She'd bloomed and thought
that tonight was lost

to expectation.

He rested his memory
of her smoke filled
denial.

Nothing left emptied
emotion.


Caroline Shank
12.9.2022

We are all  walking,  wounded.
Pedestrians on a planet we have
never been to before. I read that
someplace.  I don't mean to
place myself outside of literature
but rather as a note on the follicle
of philosophy. Entropy is where
I mostly find myself.
"the rest is not our business"

Do you remember who said that?
Another abstruse literary spot
on the book of where to go next.

I will write about this again in
some other poem. I do believe
tomorrow wakes us up to
new pages turned by some
gasp of wisdom.
Tomorrow and tomorrow….
is the cats contribution

She licks herself clean.


Caroline Shank
2.13.22

You are very likely watching

football and I don't mean to

interrupt.  I am thinking of you

and wondering how you are?

I know great and terrible things

are occurring in your world.


My world is failing by chips and

blisters.  It's third down for us.

Tomorrow will exist as it always

does.  


But I will be glad to have some

time alone.  To feel you

not always coming in my

door.  To sit and think about

how much I want a cigarette,

a glass of Sherry.


You may not walk in 

and that matters.  It really does,

but not as much as yesterday.


Play your silent games.  

I reclaim my life. 

You don't have to look so

puzzled.  

We were not so very much,

after all. 



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

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

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

Everybody Cries with
Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Eyes are opened, floods of
crying, knuckles of gratitude.

Be the recipient of family lore.
Cry if you might, determine that
the path to history is wiped across
centuries.  Everybody Cries.

The album of black pages, the
erudition of Dr Gates, the heat
roiled by emotion is the evidence

of harrowing challenges, of
generations of breathing in
ancestral DNA.

I reject the family tree my
parents laid out as if it were
unique. The tiring conversation.

Dr Gates would not be interested
in the memoir of my mother's fantastical
ancestry.  Her blood was sanctified
by the Bourbons!

My father's "pig-**** shanty Irish"
was the ongoing lyric of our
youth.  Dr Gates would find
the lunatic fringe to which
I belonged unenlightened.

Today I will tear my history
from my mother's voice. I will
rejoice in my father's greatness.

(There is no such thing as the past,
Eliot wrote.  Many have argued.)

I paste my past into notebooks.
I am in

the final quarter acre of my life
and I am neither better nor
worse for the pages of my
family tree.

I am unholy and entombed
in a metaphorical  book

scribed

of an unconsecrated life.


Caroline Shank

9.11.2022

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

The rippling of the sand in a shoreline
pool is the shallow response to the

waves.

The sunshine's answer is to the dark.
Tomorrow always unfolds in the
prism of today.

Love unrequited lies on the heart like
tears on the page
Shiny shells

     Lie. Your hands
hold your face and
Wait.

You will find the
   Shift of my love

Onto

   Your beautiful

timeless moment.

Context will show you

The Way to my

      heart.


Caroline Shank
10.22.23

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

I will write

A new vocabulary carefully grown.
Words light with the scents of
recognition.

poems
you have to look for, create sounds so
elusive only in your freest moments
will you feel them passing through
you,

beating gently between beats,
singing between notes,

sliding like
silk between that which you know
and that which you want.


Caroline Shank
A long time ago

I thought you were good
for me, but you're not.  You
are pretty and you sound
like a soft summer wind
whistling through tall grasses.

You have so many sides.
You run your hand down
the gentle nubs of my thoughts.
One side caresses and another
side wounds.

You rain along my stem.
A footprint on my
back, a signature to
an iambic attempt.

Your voice is the poem.
The sound of absurdity
is the dilemma.



Caroline Shank

Fear



Fear falls.  I cry
and the mealy ground catches the
sound. I am old.  This is
a young person's dilemma.

The koan that
no one believes is
you and the clapping of my
voice are one in the
desert.  The old cat yawns.
She has heard this sorry
song before.
I mouth your name.

The wind has stopped.  The
cat licks her paws before
she kneads me.  I am alone
with this indifferent creature.  My
arms are around myself where
only the old cat sleeps.


Caroline Shank
9.1.21

Feel the change of the
Seasons.  The light in
streaks on your arm's
red hair.

The wind, on a good
day, God's embrace.

Feel the change of the
Seasons amber tossed
curls.  The whitening
pelt, earth's embrace.

The nearby squirel uneasily
counts her chestnuts.  She
reminds the tree of
riddles.  What? Nonsense.

The tree offers only comfort,
a remainder of the turn of
the shadow's dance into
rest.

Walk thru the Pillars of your
imagination, feel only the
seasons past and to come.

Feel the change
sweeping the
cooling light under into
that drains winter whispers
to…

Stop the moment from
beginning its turn to and

away from the primordial
Image of

you in Summer's arms,
mine,

still willing.


Caroline Shank

Five powerful privet hedges formed
a fence in our front yard in New York.
My mother planted them for some
reason, known only to her.

The branches grew sparse and suffered.
Failure to thrive.  Knee high to my
twelve year old body, it never bloomed
in that yard of green weeds and dandelions.

It was meant to keep the
dogs away.  We had feral cats
in the yard.  My brother and I
were feral.  My mother bred us
into the wind of 1940's Chicago.

So that was that for her.  She
retreated into madness from
Chicago to New York to
South Bend.

Fences, like my mother's
addictions, are not always seen.
They crawl up your leg like
flakes of hate.  They keep growing
until your eyes are holes in the
twigs.

A fence so thick you think
only prayers will let you out.
Easter Sunday blooms in
the trailers and filaments.

No relief.  They scratch
on your so small soul.  White
privet petals crawl into crevice
and crease.  

I no longer itch but
tic with the rhythm
of the seasons.


Caroline Shank

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

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

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

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

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

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

my hair.

Caroline Shank
1.23.2023

The 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






.

I have tears still Un fallen from
my eyes.  They ambush me.
Your birth the
unexpected star of my
life.  Your full face, my
glowing reflection.

Early twirling years in
yellow plaid and a brown
horse named coffee cakes,
dancing on my lap.

You turned to leave me in
the middle of the afternoon.
Eons ago to my heart's ache.

I rock in old clothes on a
winter afternoon.  Your
lost Angel faces me.  I
did wrong.  I cried for
your beauty.

Lord of little girls forgive
me. I run after the early
years, pray for another
moment's innocence.

Turn me away from these
falling tears. Bring me
another time I may

not forget.


Caroline Shank
1.21.2023

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

auburn heaps of my youth
would jolt me.

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

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

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

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

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



Caroline Shank

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

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

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

From don Juan de Marco



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

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

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

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




Caroline Shank

Are you sleeping up there in
the stone parapet in which
you spend your time writting
letters and showing how you
can trip the light fantastic

with no one watching. You,
where you retreat to listen
to music. To read your books
and with wine dream,
like Miniver Cheevy, of the
days of roses.

Do you think of me? My
perfume you were so fond
of.  Oh, how I adored you!

I am not allowed to climb
the steps to your so private
sanctuary.  The locked door
reminds me of your pledge
to God to leave me and the
child.  

We are not yours, not anymore.
You with your hunched shoulders
crying "That is not all, that is
not it at all."

Your dead heroes replace me.
I should have gone away before
I knew you loved me.  But how
could I?  I will tomorrow shows
me a new place to hide away

Think of me when you are
inside with your plans and dreams.,
and I am on the outside scrolling
across the long years in which
I am stranded

in.


Caroline Shank