To be acutely that is, to be, alone
is a topic phenomenologists
ravish.

The dialectical imperative at
least requires two souls
reaching for the strands, like
light waves, the flash food
of the Universe.

Tomorrow I will meet the son
of Master Albert and the laps
of the twirling firmament will
strike dumb the song of
gods.

Mea Culpa Mea Culpa,

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

I digress   To be me is
always to be

alone


Kyrie eliason


Caroline Shank
10.11.23

I sit here.  

The winds
of late summer
sweep the curls of
dust over the
linoleum floor.

I think about
what it is to be declined,
to be culled out
as a small fish
is thrown back to the boy.

It was a rush
we exceld in
those years when

all I ever wanted was you,
and the music on the juke box in
the corner booth.  You wore
red plaid, but
it was your eyes that
portalled always,
the galleries we
explored frequently before
love.

I smoke a cigarette
or something,

inhale the evening.
think of the
Excavations:

The Creases of Conversation
that reflect in madness.
The Manuscripts of memory
scribed in
the night.

I lean into Friday.



Caroline Shank
8.25.2022

If anyone asks you I am old
and out of shape.  My legs
curl under me when I stand.
There is a whoosh in my ear
from the fall the other night.

My face of many colors
goes before me like an
electric light.  

I wobble on shifted
ground.  No longer young
I am a cramp in the leg
of time.  

My children go before me and
I watch and I wait.  They are
middle aged and turn to their
own concerns.  

I remain ununderstood not
that I was, clearly, ever taken
for the woman I was.  

If anyone asks tell them
I understood the song
of madness,

and I wait for
the end
of reason.


Caroline Shank

If I come to you I will be unriddled,
singing and shot through with
poetry. My gift will be the rings
around my soul, the songbirds
and the winds of Jupiter, warm
touched my arms and the
long wait of my legs.

If you come to me be it on
a Monday when you are
at your best and relaxed.
Bring me the scent of musk,
the water gobleted in crystal
for my waiting lips.

We will clasp the future as if
it was Young.  The breeze

on our faces

blows over

the carved vows

on the birchwood

tree.


Caroline Shank
April 2, 2023

If I Could I Would

go back to my genetic ancestry,

swim unmussed by personality

in a rain filled quarry.  A

clean shell in a pocked

landscape, prior to pain,

prior to, God knows, love

knows me.


recline in the primordial ooze.

one cell, untransmittable.

Unable to become, anything.


leave, God, this one small

organism guiltless of begetting

just this one girl in the

frozen forests of the human

future.

You are no one in particular. If I saw you on the city's streets I would
pass you by as the wind scrufs
the fallen leaves on the
***** sidewalk.  
I would not know you
as you were,
a soldier and a king.

You have forgotten promises
and faith.  Life is a sad thing
when the little mention in
the paper has only the
inelegant childhood phrase:
Dominus vobiscum.

People will say How Odd
she was and round in her
years of silence.

Someone will wonder if
I were ever loved and if I
danced in the
dim light of the red room,
with a slot machine and
not much else but the
music and the breath
between us.


Caroline Shank

I Found God

I found God in a Baptist Church
in Milwaukee.
Faith,  small hands and
scratched bibles.

Warm cookies.

The delicate and the children.
Their names in coded
words on the skin under

my arms. .

Dedicate: the
day to the great E. Perience.

There is a new Age
coming.

I smoke a cigarette.

God arrived in fancy clothes.

Women dressed, frown.
Still voices in the

Wilderness

Witness the Beloved
baptism of perfumed
sinners

I smoked for them all.
My fee for being previously

Apostate.


Caroline Shank

If you kiss me now our eyes
will close and we will
push against each other
like fruit vying for the light,

In the nightpain of loving
our eyes will slowly open
and your face will wilt
until its cheeks and crevices
dim under the sad symmetry of
our public lives.

If you kiss me now I will forget
the grown repair of skirt alone
in the loud sound of memory
as it slips ever so gently away.


Caroline Shank

Only small things, a moment,
a book title, the minutes
it costs to think of you.

The ends of conversation,
served, a chip of being.
The loosed love,

hovers.

A savory
is refused.

The empty glass
a refill.

Tomorrow is left
out of me.

It lies like the last
syllable

of my shriveled
lexicon.

I am unraveled and
like thought itself
I go

away

from even the

thought

of you.


Caroline Shank
7.19.2024

My breath shatters the
frozen ice of all
distinction.

Tomorrow I will clean
   the corridors of my
thoughts but tonight
   I will wait for the
mordant memories.

The red roses, in the
garden you planted
for me over

fifty years ago
do not grow inside
the cold Wisconsin
   battering on my
    
window tonight

I have no Valentine
     from you today.

No nor a whisper of
the door
closing behind you
  By the quiet nurse

so long ago.


Caroline Shank
2.14.2024

I hope to see you soon,
in the morning with
rumpled hair and boxer
shorts.

I hope to see you soon,
when the Spring sun
is high and the blue of
your eyes wash the
shadows of separation
away.  

I hope to see you soon,
when stars crinkle the
daylight and the songs
of the night cricket
compline.

Will we walk the
lined path along the
beach of memory?

If there is nothing left
after the lighthouse has
gone dim and illness
separates us forever

know that I will be
there in the interstices
of our heart's last
singing.


Caroline Shank

It was not important, what you said.
It was not really the end of life
when you were leaving.  You took
all  sound with you.  But the rain.

Drenched and bone cold I
called you.

You hid in the tall bushes.  Tied as
you were to my voice you still
broke free. I was untethered
and alone.  I cried
as I left you in the dark.

You are silence leashed to my
last memory.  I was untried and
I lost.

I breathed your air.  You inhaled
me.  I told you I wouldn't hurt you.
But I killed the first fragile filaments
of touch, of kiss.  You folded like
a cloth in the night.  I ran to God
who didn't want me.

I have written poems with
the ink of time's pallette.
Colors I remember.  Did you
cry that night you left me in the
rain?  I died for three days.

You can find me, if you look,
behind time's trickster.

You don't like heartbreak poems.
I know this much.  Your impatience
defies reality.  I melt the ink
with which you scoff.  I am
not heartbroken.

I am become death.

I linger alone.

Caroline Shank

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

The trees shadow and
Un bark, our initials flaunted.

The yellow hue is baked
And naked are the letters.

Undone are alphabets of
stories. Tomorrow doesnt
exist. The flaf is torn and
washed.

Spelling is wasted on the
young.

Today sheds minutes on your own words
grave, dappled letters
ride down the sidewalk
and I am forever mottled.


You took away


your name
, written with the wind

and songs


unsung.


Caroline Shank
10.20.2023

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

Imaginings

Midsummer.

My thoughts are
charged by
familiar memories.

It's been almost 50 years.
You and the heat
and the music.  A joint
between us and the
puppy running around.

I believed in you.
We danced in the
room above the bar.  
Mrs. Jones. The wick lit.
Tomorrow was a day
away.  

The blue smells of smoke.  
The beach.  The soft sand.
The striped umbrella.
Our music played for
a thousand nights.

Jeans and leather.
Together.

*

I prayed for hours.
In my chair, in the
sunlight.

"Love him my love" I repeated
for so long that July Sunday.

We belonged to a rift in time.
I excavated in the sand and found
you.

We were young then. The
sound of your bike is in
my sleep.

I never knew
it could hurt
so much.

You never waved

goodbye.




Caroline Shank
June 15, 2022

I miss skin that doesn't crinkle.
The kind the doesn't matter
what I'm wearing.

I miss beepers. The 7730 hello
page.  The calls from people
wanting to go out to eat.

I miss moving like the wind
blowing daisies and spoors
of dandelions

What about singing in the
snow you ask?
The farther my poor article
could reach in the total
silence of the winter.

Most of all i miss warm
saltwater swims in the
early mornings, coffee
strong with sweetener.

I miss.you kissing me
with the wayward wind
playing.

The sirroco of my life
began in a dream.

It will drift like
phosphorescence
unconfused with

Poetry


Caroline Shank
7.28.2023

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

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

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

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

Caroline Shank

We have ridden camels
in the Kalahari,
Flew Eagles over Canada,
walked across the Niagra.

We have boated up the
Nile and pierced the
catacombs of Rome.
We made love by the
red rock in Australia.

Our adventures overlap
memory.
We've spun the Sun and
tossed the moon,
walked on coals,
groomed gorillas and
climbed to Lhasa.

We were married in Tibet,
among the Chinese stalls,
made our way to India
and slept with tigers.

The planet swings
as we kiss, and spins
to the rhythm of Joy.


Caroline Shank

"In My Life" yes she well remembers
you in the Summer of her 28th
year.  She has never seen the likes
of her since then.

She scans the air for red sunsets, for sandy beaches, for tears in the
fabric of time itself.  

You go now.  Her reverie is hers alone.  She shares herself with
no one.  At last she remembers
"In My Life" . The song repeats
and she dances around with you
in the dust of her old age.

You are gone a long time.
The only thing is,  
the music
remained.

Caroline Shank

Help me make it through
Oh God of my unknowing
Brace MY name unto
even the farthest heartbeat.

The clocks dim.
I no longer hear the
movement.
.
Hand of years, the
children and the
getting. Minutes
bend the geography.

Take
me to the
honeyfields.  

I lie
down

to Sleep

I pray.



Caroline Shank
12.16.2022

I Prayed that I would love
someone
again in this lifetime.

That he would
recognize
me in my selfness
and be glad.

Glad as primitively as a
single
glimpse
regales the saddest

crying echo of my
name morphing into
Song.

Have I found that
ecstatic moment?
Have you in the
moment's recognition
sung with me

tonight?

No The End is not my
Beginning. It is the

World

Which breathed our
names

Together



Caroline Shank
11.19.23

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

I remember you,  the midnight
phone calls you wanted me to
listen to, your day,  your work,
your other life.

The time, like clinking money, falls
into the jar on the mahogany
telephone table.   The same dark
wood grain on which I trace the
date of our first date,  kiss, the
only memory to last unchanged

by time,  by events,  by the wine.

The bottom of the glass where the
cheap red box's liquid left the drain
of midnight conversations is  now
this soggy epistolary testament.  

Don't tell me that you toast to a
frail collapsed container such
as is love unknown to the daylight,
the sidewalks of experience.

You only knew in me a triffle,
a while, of white pages.  
I knew you in the
dark sonnets of poetry.

Then you closed your sentence with
a masculine ending like
a gun shot across the page.  

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

I saw you in the Alhambra.  I signaled 

And you gathered the purple from

Night, flew with me to the

ring of clouds and married me. 


The sky sang, the birds as big as 

mountains were our witness. 


You sang a song like Thunder. 

We rolled our love

across the sky. 


We will live a thousand 

times Longerthanforever.



Caroline Shank

I should talk about you Ma,
but what is there to say?
You lived like an illusion
inside of a nightmare.

You were born to be a
queen.  You said so
so often I wanted to run
away forever and never
again hear you prattle.

I wanted to love you but
failed.  You were brave
in your illness.  You wore
your psychosis like a
badge.  The crest of
madness suited you.

When you died they laid
you out like royalty.
Finally you composed
the scenery for us,
your subjects.

Michael was unmoved
while I cried.  Daddy was
a wreck washed up on
a lonely island.  His raison
d'etre gone forever.

My tears were a shock.
The last two minutes you
took from me.

I have never returned to
your lonely palace

underground.


Caroline Torpey Shank

I submit to you the plan,
the blueprint,
the perfect wedding
day.  

The storybook sun of
an early fall afternoon.

Church people in  purple
and white congregate.

Congratulations are petals
on the browning lawn.

It's September of a day
pulled from memory.

The church bells scurry like
living tones let loose.
A random exercise
in hearing.

The early mark on a white
wall's
lifeline scars my woman's
soul.

Death makes the day's ride
a long goodbye.


Caroline Shank

It's a movie afternoon.  On the
menu today is Stephen King.
Pennywise, gruesome and
gore.  Sit tight the clown
is coming. Up and over,
round and round.  Balloons
rip the fragile air,  Screams
tear through today.

The sewer is full of blood.
The axel-tree is full of mud.
I see it in the look of his
face.  "I'm coming!" is his
insistent cry.

Who's in there now? Go in
and see. I am bound to a
mixture of fear.  Stir me up.
Tap off the movie.  He is
scared even as he writes.

I turn around and see the
clown.  He melts into me.
I only know enough
to run scared.

I am bound for the after-
noon train to Derry.

Caroline Shank

It is not love that breaks your heart,
Craig, it's the blankness rubbed
against sunlight on the window,
when the smear appears.  

Or not that but it is the redaction
of a life organized around
a thought ordained. I keep
telling you, the evidence doesn't lie.
It was planned and signed,
that there was no future at all.

"Go" , you say, "you can do this"

But it's the mask I never saw you see,  
it's the slice of the night's
warm wind which once
caressed me that now leaves me alone,
the darkness between
breaths bewildered
by his speech.

It's not love that breaks your
heart, it's the scream
in the ephemeral

moment




Caroline Shank

I try for a gentle sound, to
say your name in quiet tones,
so like a bird having given
birth in a nest might not cry,
but would settle down to an
afternoon of birdsong, her
charge warm and waiting
for the yolk of future singing
be without requests having
no knowledge of choices.

Caroline Shank
June 16, 2022

February in Milwaukee is a quiet time.
Waiting for Spring and trying to lose
weight for the usually beautiful
midwestern summer.

Shots ring out.  The brewery is a
Crime Scene.   Snow falling on
police.  People are dead.  The
shooter too.  No more information yet.

It's a cold Wednesday.  School
children are hustled away.  Hours
in lockdown.  The press scurry
like beetles.  Flashing lights are
blinking like scared eyes in the
crowd.

Over and over the sounds of
chaos are quieted.  Clouds fall
steam and noiseless tears
as people are released to
go home.  A TV reporter
asks banal questions of
survivors.

The brewery goes on melting
hops and grains.  Mash is
safe at least as Milwaukee
bars stock Miller beer to
complete the conversation.


Caroline Shank
2.26.20

It's a quarter past midnight.
Begin, here, the dirge.  
The promises of love
are missing.

We danced.
A long time ago
The shuffle, the
slow, rub,
lingers.

I did not reach out
thru the abyss,
to you
on the other side.

I grow old with
briars and cattails.
The winds scream and
the last song fractures the

heart of me.


Caroline Shank
12.31.21

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

262 555- 5555 and i
can see
well enough to drive.99 pages

I am swinging my arms.

I take my white hand
and in your freest moment
I will
dress wounds whose polar
regions,

like my heart, sigh with
slogans.

Be mine says the moments
transcendent.

Catch me through the rye.
You will hear the singing

Grass Harp telling you of
love and growing things.

"Love is a chain of love"
wound around the
farthest star.  

Listen to me.  December
Is a stone's throw away.

I fall and there are
little kindness especially
holding me. Precariously

I wait for a season's
diminish.  A cry of

     sadness
in the face of
Winter's approach.

         Stay me then
into June …

and. Beyond.



Caroline Shank
10.31.2023

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
.

It's quiet now. I hear the washer
from the next apartment.  Even my
birds

are quiet.

It's when I think of you that the
spinning axis of the planet
requires my attention. The
door that alarmed last year
still screams.  You turned
away from me.  I heard the

slam of your heart, the ram
at the end of your life.  I left

without a kiss.  I live without
your steel.

I turn to where your son
shines and I am guilty

of loving you

still.


Caroline Shank

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

It's when the tears dry up,
when the arms are no longer
feeling the loss, when unkissed
the days end that sorrow becomes
memory only and the flat back
of yesterday loses color.

Try harder to replace the moments
strangely forgotten, to remember
the trust, to relive.  Wrapped in memories that once slayed
the dragons of doubt only to
find the pieces of a life unloved
after all in simple shards incapable
of stinging that the ends of
believing are achieved.

This ceases to be a cause for
fear, this lost labor at last
unexpected but tired with
unstrain and blurred with
yesterday's tears.

To lose is always a shock.
To cease to be moved
is a thud in the soul of time.


Caroline Shank

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

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

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

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

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

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

you

can't see me wildly

search your face

for

recognition.



Caroline Shank

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

I used my last chance, a ride
on the solar system of emotions.
I fell off and sat for a minute
on the eyelash of memory.

The long rope of my only
last and forever temptation
unkind and undone.

It's not true.  It takes a minute
to unravel the sinue wrapped
around the idea of you.
Wrought around the music

is you struggling forever,
trying to unravel the speed
of memory.

The seed of yesterday,  The
bed of undoing.  Red and
ripped I cling to the
final appointment.

Tomorrow is the kaleidoscope
you feared. The colors
patterns solidify and the habits
reveal the dead solid center.

I surround myself with the
sunflower blanket. The
synapse of yesterday tugged

before I knew you.

and dragged
the moon's light mine.


Caroline Shank

I wait for the cold dark to run
like *** down my chin.

I wait for the sun to round
the side of my building
bringing tomorrow's promise.

It was always to be tomorrow
when I taste your licorice flavored
mouth again.

I wait like the Oracle said,
for the time when the gods
will bring you to my song.

I wait. Coltrane blowing
forever in my heart.  

Forever, the saxophone,
your breath,
in my hair.

I wait for tomorrow. For music.
For wine.  A song to
sing to the empty nights.
I drink to the miles into
darkness…



Caroline Shank

I will drink loneliness in my
coffee. The sweet is turned to
sorrow, the cream is the stir
of tears.  

I will not last this.
The table was set when you
strode into darkness.

I will pin loneliness on the board.
The same letters unwrite.

Half a century is not enough
to unbelieve.  The scattered
seconded invitation is
laid green and turbulent.

I leave loneliness a song
to the unbeliever.

You fold my intention like
a glove broken in.

Winter is always the last
cry in the dark sound
under the stairs.

I leave the sounds of the
wheel under my
shoes, in Winter unsounds
tears that dry in eyes
of the unbeliever,

you, walk like steel cleats
over my poems.


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

I write to please the gods of
unloving.  The manuscripts
are read in the dark. Red eyes
pierce my dreams. I am a
pencil with yellow lead.

Only the darkness can read
the heavy lines of Purgatorial
rhymes.  I do not like rhyming
I'm not very good at it.

I am a mangle pushing out
sheets of my mind,
wrung for you.
Don't say that.  You don't want
to matter.  I have listened
to the susurrus of that tune

before.

I scribe my songs
on parchment skin…
I am a private person.
It is alone that I belong
to this notebook.   It's the
scores of fifty years of

watching for you.  Gone now.
Everywhere are the trinkets,
the baubles.  Even the cat is
quiet. Her quest
to find you is
exhausting.  

I write to the sound

of me calling
you
in the dark..


Caroline Shank

I write so you will answer me.
I see you sit, your confusion
curled like hair on a new poodle.

I write to touch your face with
my thoughts.  Know that my
fingers wrap around your sorrows.

I offer my hand in reply to
your silence.  I wait for

you
to touch

me.

Here I am.  I write words
in the wind

which brushes

by you.


Caroline Shank

I write to know that I'm
alive.  Someone else said
that. I just can't remember
who.  I write the vowels
and consonants of the
swirls of my own life.

I remember in the first place
the keys that opened the
doors of wonder.  Not always
a good thing I can assure you.
Growing up was filled noise.

Secondly I remember the
troubles.  Years of pale white
when I witnessed my mother's
bitterness, my father's
kindness, the worldmakers
of our youth.

Number three taught me
to breathe in the screams
of my mother's midnight
rantings. This is when I
taught myself to smoke. The
cancer of her determination
was to ruin us all.

I stopped counting.  My life
after girlhood, cowl
of stillborn years, trod the
boards of marriage and
babies.  

You were the pages without
names.  Months of writing
torn from a book and
saved.  Can you find me
like a lonely letter?

I write to remind you of the
vellum we shared, so briefly,
to which this lonely passage
belongs.

Find me.

Caroline Shank

I write in flames of love
unallowed.  You who do
not know the pain fly on
Dove's wings

oblivious to the heat,
the colors, the bent
dreams as I reach

For the sight of you.
Fly away.  I will burn
here in the fires of

my hopeless devotion.
I am red with lost
desire.  Fly to the

land, light on the
water, I so long for,

You.

Caroline Shank