That's the way the cards
were dealt.

You on the other side
of the planet, me here
underneath
the subterranean
wheel of my mother's
lousy
life.

Her abuse,
the sins of her
violence.

wrap her voice around
my memories.  

There she is now,
aboard the ageing Ship
Caroline, docked
down by the stones on the

cobblestone
   of dreams.  

Look
my darling,

another love
slips
away


Caroline Shank
11.25.2025

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

Are you sleeping up there in
the stone parapet in which
you spend your time writing
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.



Caroline Shank
4.29.20

It's never going to stop
being Friday
The Birth of Sacraments
is not Good.

Autumn is Friday's punch
in the gut of Summer   It's
always Friday.  The windblown
faded days are a trampled
graveyard.

Today is Friday and if I shovel
the fake faded Forrest of time
it is always Friday.  The perennial
glare of a Gregorian mistake.

Christ died for me on a
Friday!
Illusions of time passing are
like

Prayers

blown back

on a Friday.

Today tears the pages off.  You
flip it over.

Friday appears as oil from
the flood.  


Caroline Shank
9.2.2022

People touch people in some
free-form folding of lives,
briefly, changing shapes,
always re-emerging against
new sides, blending like
figures on a screen, always
in motion, changing colors,
signifying some never-ending
continuum, floating in a
liquid teeming with
possibility, sliding
into each other, skin to
skin for the length of a
second.  Touch is the
brush of friends
at anchor.


Caroline Shank

"I have forgotten your love yet I seem to
glimpse you in every window". Neruda

The closer I come to your image as
I pass the shop windows the more
I can't recall your touch.  My skin
no longer vibrates as you once knew
it.  Do you remember?

I have forgotten your kiss.  Your
red lips in the glass do not resemble
memory.  They are the stain
left in my soul after longing
has gone.

"Because of you, in gardens of blossoming
flowers I ache from the perfumes of spring."
Neruda

I no longer look in the glass to see
you calling.  That I no longer
remember.

Your glimpse is a broken pain
to my still aching denial.

Caroline Shank

It's April snow on daffodils.
Yellow stains on the white sky.
Drops from God to salve the
feral pain.

I wait for tulips who are encased
in green buds.  A lot of
energy in the making of a flower.
It reminds me of a prayer.

I think my Azalea has gone for
soldiers, and the lilacs wait
for me to heal.  The faces in this
garden look to you.

I am all alone with my prayers,
this station is one before the
Crucifixion. My Garden waits
for our reconciliation as
snow floats on in time past
and time future.

Now is not our cup
of Salvation.  

Forgiveness is not
our business.



Caroline Shank

Depression lurks, stalks.
My woods are deep to
hide these creatures
from

You.

I have no season.

No respite.

You will never know that
my life is not well lived.

I have you to bless my
days and none to bless
my nights.

Tomorrow's go away before
they reach me.  I'm am
eternally present.

My group would scold me.
All is only eternally

present.

Irrevocably trapped in
Unforgiveness,

I sluff off your kindness
as I am tired in the mud
of my conscious
observations.

You will risk nothing
in loving  me. I am
not there.

This poem is itself
Ungrateful, under
the sun of no light.

The paradox of your
love is to me

the vehicle that will
take me to you

fully  in love.


Caroline Shank
January 21, 2024

Outside my window is a globe
dropping frozen tears
that hover between the small
spaces afraid of touch.

Distanced from each
other by the sweeping of
grass on the frozen seeds
of a landscape falling from
trees.

The sky is abandoned to
fate.  We walk on tiptoe.
Today is not enjoyed.
There is no kiss.

My bird sings from her
cage, oblivious to familial
possibilities that render
me reaching for the
soap.

Snow turns to
glops on wet pavement.
We stay indoors.  Our
own globe infected with
a search for sanity.

We can only touch
thru glass.


Caroline 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

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

Caroline Shank
7.6.2024

I cried because I'm old.
You said age is just a number.
I cried because I'm ugly,
Age has collapsed me, taken
     from me the looks of
     interest.
I cried because the end is near.

You have given me the looks
my soul seeks.

I cry now because you are
     far away.

“You Raise Me Up” plays
     on my heart.

There are tears of longing’s
     frustration
now until you happily walk
     off the plane
  
  toward our life.

when we will sing
     together happily

in
  
   God's Grace.


Caroline Shank
11.3.2024

So I sez to noone there.
Go in pease.
Noone answered so i
suppose you are hanging
around.  Let the day fold
into another night.  I no
longer cry for you I sez.

I bring back from you
the nurturing, the dreams.
So I will no longer go
wichu to the palace of
jewels that was your
hideout.  Only I was
allowed in until you
jest turned around and
disappeared.  

I known no other love.
I will not suffer for a long
the way I drop crumbs
for you to follow in cases
you look for me in the
undergrowth of the years
and tears of a life
mistaken.


Caroline Shank

Good morning Sunshine, roll over me
in that special way.  Bring out the
juice that warms me.  I see your clear
heat.  You are not invisible to me.

Roll over me Sunshine.
I wait on the day.  Gray days
you hide.  I know.  You are
Tantalus to my Sophia.  I call

you out of hiding to run your
fingers over my skin call
cry to be love touched.

Good morning sunshine. I
wait for your song.  Rub on
my skin.  I am open
and I hold hot hands with
the summer winds.

I am mellowed by your touch.

Caroline Shank

Grace

is breathed.

Life sustained,

without asking.

Today is Thanks

For you

The last time I saw
you
in blue jeans

walk toward
me

The Dove of God

Arriving.

Saecula Saeculorum


Caroline Shank
1.17.2025

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

The pale face of morning
has not arrived yet.
The gloaming penumbra  of today
will break through and scatter
syllables of this dream across the
last face of today

I am going to try to write the haiku
I promised myself I would to
complete the seasons cycle.
It scares me to think that you
are going to see this attempt
to reach into tomorrow
and find in it the last vestige
of a psychiatric embrace
of all things Eliot.

Bring forth this
smothering  mother
of a morning,
The poetry
correlative of the condition
of this myth is a blessing.
This is a good thing
and lives in the sun's
bright chambers.

The grace rendered in the
skew of this is

a light that shines

in our imagination.



Caroline Shank
2/11/22

Spring

Clouds form.  Cold north winds
roll in.  We run toward Spring.
Slide.  You warm in me.


Caroline Shank

Everybody sings Hallelujah.  The
long song Leonard penned.

So many verses, so little we know.
Read the lyrics.

Life happens while poetry
is carved out of the soul of
dead beats.  We sing

the notes of no matter.

I read outhouse news on
the back words of
Marianne.

She went clear.  Who knew?
Seek the hymns and you
reap the elevation of the
******.

Hallelujah is in the sharp
side of writing.  It found

you, inevitably, on my
kitchen chair. The song
is to you, I failed the

class.


Caroline Shank
11.5.2022

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

The clock no longer chimes.
The dinner bell no longer rings.
These sounds on which I so
depend
have
gone.

Your place is in the grave
with flowe#sș00rs down u ND er
A ND unanswered prayers¢.


Caroline Shank

Act 5; scene 3

You shuffled off your mortal coil
at the wrong **** time.
The  denouement Is not here yet.  
Your death left
footprints into ,Dunsinane with
your Lady,  Me.

We had plans and schemes.
We didn't finish the play.
Dunsinane was ours. Your
birthday of will.

The rescue was sold out.  You
we're a hit.  The Scottish play
was untroubled. Your crown
cleaned.  You stumbled into
the play's last act.

That I must go on alone out of this
creaking pasture, this mudhole,
to be traversed without you
is a remarkable lapse in your
Ordinary

My hands hurt for the rubbing
of them.  I am alive because
you aborted the play.

Return to me. I have paid
Dearly

for this ticket that was

meant for two.


Caroline Shank
5.10.2023

Hey Alabama.  I drove through

you half my life ago.  You were

most green and gracious.  Blue

skies foamed clouds supine on

my skin.  A thin veil of fog an

unseen future away.


I slowly crossed your planet,

picked flowers on the verge.

I remember the heat.  The red

hair of summer curled against

the day.  Nights vibrated, a gong

gone mild.  Soft, resonating, still

resonating.  I breathed air in

like smoke, holding it inside

for long seconds, a question

waiting for its answer.


Long years have veined miles,

mapped time.  I am blued with

thinking of it.


Hey Alabama.

I remember.  Your highways

still, so sweet.  You travel

soft as sleep.

Caroline Shank

Hey Alabama. I drove through
you half my life ago. You were
most green and gracious. Blue
skies foamed clouds supine on
my skin. A thin veil of fog an
unseen future away.

I slowly crossed your planet,
picked flowers on the verge.
I remember the heat. The red
hair of summer curled against
the day. Nights vibrated, a gong
gone mild. Soft, resonating, still
resonating. I breathed air in
like smoke, holding it inside
for long seconds, a question
waiting for its answer.

Long years have veined miles,
mapped time. I am blued with
thinking of it.

Hey Alabama.
I remember. Your highways
still, so sweet. You travel
soft as sleep.


June 11, 2000 rc

HI Sam. It's nice of you to
stop by the carousel.  I was
looking for a place to stand.
My hands are blistered,
and I am covered with the
salt of ancient tears.

You are welcome to taste
a slice of yesterday.

My poems are stones to throw
Into the lake of imagination.
You ask, from my lips, a song, which
I cannot fathom.

My writings are my culminations.
The detritus of my lover's stories.
I write for them, the sea grasses of
which I am composed.

Don't take away the tangles.

I write for you to stay in the
grass castle. I apologize for
the rumpled beds and bare
promises.

I am scarred by my lover's
last goodbye's.

But Sam, I am

happy

to see

you.




Caroline Shank
7.31.2022

History

My history is irrelevant. Or
say that strong winds blow
away the details we all
thrive on.  The meals we
shared over coffee are past
and strong flavors remind
me of the debates over
formica and Sinatra on
the juke box.

If I am, today, a thinking
person say that my ideas,
which I cling to so strongly,
are the stitches of lessons
learned and the rewards of
companionship forged in
the youth of the 60s.

The bombs of politics dropped
on our coffee house opinions
like cold rain on the
northern lobes of ideas.

Say then that I am without
formally able to reply to
your erudition.  I am not
pretty or laden with the
vocabulary needed to
conduct the symphony.

Remain forever young then
and if you can't read the
poetry of the past.
Travel the miles.

Sound your trumpets

Read Herodotus and
think of me once
in a while


Caroline Shank

"Everyone goes away in the end"
Cash sings, his anthem to the
times he left behind.

When, if, in the event I have not
returned, the song will still
sound the name of our child.
Life will spread the remains
of our faded experience.  

Return to the signposts, those
arrows who should have
run while the music was in love.

There was smoke in the air
Hernando.

Poems are

steps

along the edge.


Caroline Shank
8.29.2022

I am enough. I am bigger

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

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

Voodoo priests.  

In my imagination I was
lauded by Great Spirits.

I am enough to fly between
the Holy Days, the

Vatican of my mind is
open and I ply the

pages of my long life
from my fingers.

Caroline Shank
I.27.2024

I am fickle.  Let's face it.
I dated a lot of guys. I was
the girl in the red sweater.
Me and my saddle shoes.
I only wore Buster Brown
socks.

Look at me now. I am awash
In pink and sometimes yellow.
I don't like red and I don't like you!

Yesterday when we got married.
No 50 years ago.  Was it really
that long?  We pledged to love
Forever.  Now Forever is a
painful scar.  You were never
remotely interesting.

"so how did you like the play
Mrs. Lincoln?"

You say I can move on but
there is no place to go behind
the purple curtain.

Is this poem finished?
It would seem

that it is.  I will take

my bows, shed the
years and put the
memories in the

cardboard shoebox with
the painted scenery,

(please forgive the
Feminine endings.)

close the door and
see

my next adventure
coming for me.

I get pills

in the night.

I am in
San Francisco

to see Ginsberg.

I dream of
poetry and sand,
swimming
naked in cold clear
water…

and I sing in
my
sleep.


Caroline Shank

I will tell you why I am
so
loud.

So you would
notice me.

I am
cluttered with images.

Images that swirled
while I slept,

long and
chipped.

Your voice
rocked me to

sleep and in the
morning

I sang.



Caroline Shank
3.19.2024

I am not a kind person.

At times
I trickle interest in what
you are saying.

Mostly
I wait for
noon on a hot
day.

The breath of a
thousand words
cannot reach

the craters of
stones dug
without care.

I am not a kind person.

Where you were,
dying,
it was
the nurses who
compassioned you.

My reflection was
hidden in the
still pool of your

leaving brown eyes.

I reek with sadness,
with the
penance of being

a ;ń/. alone.



Caroline Shank

I am sick in my self.
My fingers curl
around the stylus I keep with me
at all times.

A small black plastic taper with
which I tap out pieces of my
unwholesome history.  Do you
remember when I loved you?

The green moss grew only
on the north.  My sorry
adventures were always
South.  I mean to mention,

last of my breaths that I
have been sick in the
clever ways my sorry aim

took you to my lair.  I fed
the worm of imagination
with the cookies of my soul.

You are delicious and I
wore my plight in full
view.  You called me.
I replied in tattered
sentiments.

The rotation of the earth
holds me forever South.
I can never heal the disease
of attraction.

I will love forever the sounds
of love no matter who,
no matter why.

You are a beast of my jungle.
I wear your skin like camouflage.

I bivouac where you are and
leave at night, no note, no
whisper of sorrow.


Caroline Shank
8.30.2022

I Believe for Every drop
of rain… there is a
note of wonder
A falling waters, a cataract
of stones where the
baby was born like

a song misplaced, a heart
In darkness lay in the
shadow of your lies.

My alphabet is several
runes short of the words
spelling forever,  the
never spoken, the

blue assumptions of
yesterday.

Tomorrow will be like
the sadness, it will spread
to the echoes of memory

when I believed

Caroline Shank
4.23.2024

This long life has been
informed by love.  We shared
each other Oh! for so
short a time.

Like fruit we hung onto
the sweet drops of new
nectar's night.
We peeled each other
to the pink skin of sighs.

It was a delicate scent
when blown into the
stars quiet Space.  We
sped into the walls of
destiny and crashed
in the pulp of sorrow.

But I miss you in this
orchard of dessicated
memories.

I am rawed by the thought
of you.

Caroline Shank

.

I cannot rival your blue eyes
Or the whirling
winds of your infinite skies.  

Windworn leaves tumble at
your step.  Winter turns to
summer where you are.

Walk to me slowly that I may
savor the trail you leave on
your way to my page.

I write you into time.  I hear
the bells ripple.
I have seen you travel in dreams.  

You leave me always wanting
you more than there is air above
me or ground below.

Stay where I am for now.
Use me with love.
Your song.

Caroline Shank
11.19.1 9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caroline Shank
04.15.2023

I cannot get to you.  You
are like Jerusalem, a
misguided city. Your name is exposed
to the sun while i call to you in the
silence of the volcanic pre-dawn.
You have slides of affectation.
A pilgrim might mistake
you for the safety of a handhold
hammered in the sand.

Other
travelers knew the peril of
your affection.

You don't  reply. So cold the
monument, so silent
the wall of your response.

This is all I know
and so do you that the
messages of the world fall
like the snow on the ground
white with shadows. Mute
replicas of shared emotion.

Drink to us the sour
vinegar of the sponge.

Caroline Shank
June 16, 2022

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

I collect Things

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

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

Fingers now riddled
with arthritis comb
thru junk
drawers.

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

when I collected owls.

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

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

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

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

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


Caroline Shank

I Cry

I cry for the new babies.  They
havA thrill for living.

From so small hands the
DAY is channeld.
Tomorrow has not

Yet

determined  the posture
of tomorrow

Tomorrow that will suffer
of Blue Skies and questions.
Long after the rules are

set like spoons
to drunken rules.

I cry for tomorrows
hidden like doors
the feral cats use


No work of small hands
can stop the

Guns.


Caroline Shank
January 9, 2025