I failed at poppies last

year.  They turned to 

my soil and shrugged.


Red vessels with dreams inside.

Black and yellow inhabits the

cup inside delicately.


I watched them turn from

me in indifference

they, not knowing how I longed

to share their anodyne.


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

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

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

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

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



Caroline Shank

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

Your father will be gone soon.
You will not mourn him until
Rachel refuses your own sorrowing
self.  Time like a water hose
with a short faucet will trick you
into thinking the end is not near.

It's me that needs you.
It is a lonely walk along
long grass.  You played soldiers
on the lawn of your father's gone
to seed everyone trod the clover
and yellow flowers watching you.

You will find the crossroads
to meet again if you leave him now.
His breathing is stress to you, his
failure like chains on a door
.
Take your time
while it still gives off a
fragrance
to memory that
is disbelief.

Go, take your cloak.
I tremble at your nativity.


I am an old woman who
believes in God and
not much else.  
You have turned
pride inside
to rest and think of
tomorrow.  Will you
be still be loved then

My son?

Caroline Shank
2.14.22

Purgatory

I forgot about Purgatory, the bus
stop of Catholic needs must have.
The clamor of prayers, the knee
in genuflection.  

Tomorrow I will go to mass.  I will
arbitrate with the voice in
confession.  To die in mortal sin
is my childhood's torment.  The
black robes of St. Patrick's priests.
Early mornings
with my Dad

The brown robes of the Franciscan
who stole my sins in high school.
I wasn't done with them.  I wore
pants and that angered him.  I was
not unholy just skirting the borders
of adolescence my own way.

But I digress.  Purgatory with all
those flapping carers preparing
my way to God Finally and
Absolutely. My prayers tabulated,
my envelope is unsealed.

I am old now and return the
Purgatorial wicker plate to the
transept under which lay
the dust of the unforgiven
travelers.
        Strangers in a strange land..  

The curtains whisper.,
I say penance.

Ten times.

Oh My God I am heartily… .

Amen.


Caroline Shank
10.17 2022

Italics Robert Heinlein

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

he is still asleep

she watches television

another day starts



Caroline Shank

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

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

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

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

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

on my face.

Caroline Shank

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

Will a bandaid help?

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

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

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

your many secret sounds.

Secret for the breadth it
takes

to reach your caring
embrace.

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

Singular look of a love

No one can

damage

I Will.



Caroline Shank
10.30.2024


.

I recently had that flash of
"Oh My God! "

The shirt dropped to the floor as I
reached to stop it.  I thought it
terribly unfair.   It fell first.

She thinks the first she knew was
saddened by the thought she was
not the first.

It happens, whatever "it" is, before
speech or breathing.  

Tomorrow is over first. Today's
blooms have fallen before
its scent prys recognition.

Reality, I said recently in some
class, is the happy accident of
memory.  It was at the beach
that I realized that

You arrived first. I only

remembered you.


Caroline Shank


8.27.2022

The shirt dropped to the floor as I
reached to stop it.  I thought it
terribly unfair.   It fell first.

She thinks the first she knew was
saddened by the thought she was
not the first.

It happens before
speech or breathing.  

Tomorrow is over first. Today's
blooms have fallen before
its scent prys recognition.

Reality, is the happy accident of
memory.  It was at the beach
that I realized that

you arrived first. I only

remembered you.


Caroline Shank

revision April 27 2001

Recrudescence

(Recrudesce: to break out
again after lying latent or relatively inactive)

My friend,

There are doors which even you and I
have never opened. Shut for so many
years I am slammed back against
the sink of meditation.

Drawers unopened, their loneliness
stuck shut, slipped behind hinges.
Whole cabinets of dust. I wore many
selves. Stains hang here so far
removed from conversation
as to be little calciums. Calculi.
I rattle with little bones.

But since you ask….


Viz.:

When the gun was pressed against
my head I sat more still than a
fig on a summer tree, more breathless
than a whisper, more quiet than the
center of that fruit, It’s stem
my hair, I felt it's roots
take. I was sixteen.

I always wondered if the red dye
of my fear rubbed off on him.
He was silent, his face the only light
in the room, the phosphorescence of
madness. He couldn't find
me I guess, inside my aubergine
stillness.

He was a steel shaft in
his hand. At last he slipped
to the door.

In the end, unbreathing,
I saved him.

Ego te absolvo.

I was so afraid he wouldn't
like me anymore.

(Recrudesce: to break out
again after lying latent or relatively inactive)

My friend,

There are doors which even you and I
have never opened. Shut for so many
years I am slammed back against
the sink of meditation.

Drawers unopened, their loneliness
stuck shut, slipped behind hinges.
Whole cabinets of dust. I wore many
selves. Stains hang here so far
removed from conversation
as to be little calciums. Calculi.
I rattle with little bones.

But since you ask….


Viz.:

When the gun was pressed against
my head I sat more still than a
fig on a summer tree, more breathless
than a whisper, more quiet than the
center of that fruit, It’s stem
my hair, I felt it's roots
take. I was sixteen.

I always wondered if the red dye
of my fear rubbed off on him.
He was silent, his face the only light
in the room, the phosphorescence of
madness. He couldn't find
me I guess, inside my aubergine
stillness.

He was a steel shaft in
his hand. At last he slipped
to the door.

In the end, unbreathing,
I saved him.

Ego te absolvo.

I was so afraid he wouldn't
like me anymore.

Recruit

She slept briefly, the reach,
too long now, gone.
Too many sloe gins.

Fifteen.

Brought  the
inevitable.  New York
was never a lesson

learned.

You were not born

yet.

Her poetry in her belly.
Rumpled beds. Blanket
on the backseat.

A no adult zone.

To remember Is to lose.

Again.

The rustle of the
rubber
tree.  Cat calls,
loud farts.

More, pulled out guns.

The bulge was
caused by a
magazine.

She, on the floor
of the aforementioned
seat of springs, could

not stop the
whack of boys

whose underwear
was washed by
a mother of

some, as yet
unknown,

red handed chapped
and oh so tired

Former

Recruit



Caroline Shank
9.1.2024

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

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

Renaissance man.
You are the face of God,
of breathing. You move
currents in
our direction.  

I offer you the flower
of my country.  A flourish
saved for a hero. Be my
Cavalier.  Move
true to our time.

Renaissance man
history will move
us together if only
for the length
of a petal.

Caroline Shan

Cover me in brocade, white
brocade, and tan me under
the sun.  A little glass of
sherry and a Jane Austen

book to read.  

Mention the dances,
the kisses under raw
red crepe paper hats.

We were lovers then
the breathless of
early kisses

under the pink
percale.

We were young and
tan. We spread love
like butter on bread,
like a
summer
song by Chad
and Jeremy.

Clear the dance floor
I am on my way to
you

again.

Caroline Shank
1.6.24

What i didn't know Daddy was
all the world of pain and beer.
I know you drank every night
just to slam the lid on your
mental sandbox.

The carnival of crazy that
lingered just beyond your
front door was a lapsed
Catholic's Purgatory.

You know about Purgatory,
I know you do.
The Dantesque
living room.  
I insinuate decorum
here, the bedroom stale
with fetid odors.
Cigarettes and the
unwashed
once a redheaded
beauty.

My legs ache as yours did.
No rest anyway.  Before
research.  Before the
salve of pills to calm
the crawling kicking.

I never knew Daddy that
my nightly misery was
portraiture to your pose.

You never asked me.
Never said you needed
help.  I blamed it on
the sleeplessness of a
soprano screaming

Did you know I couldn't
sleep?



Caroline Shank

prowles through my geography.
He is imperious in his flat paws
and dark, voluminous gaze.

His prowl, never the same, twice
around me. Learning the veins
and arteries of memory.  He
walks the rope of yesterday.

Black and sleek, he sways,
the tension oblique in it's
slant towards the cage bars.

I hear his rumbling response .  
He shaves the vowels of his
experience.  Glares like

tomorrow the world will end
With the slap of his jaw.
fhe end of the bars

never meant anything.  He
lumbers into my waiting gaze.

I feel the cold cold stare
of night falling on me.
He smiles in satisfaction,
paces again through my
tears.



Caroline Shank
January 14, 2022

They had children and
war planes.  Muster at 0700
Bottles boiled, flannel laundry.
Grandma's coming over.  
Lunch buckets
with a sandwich. No beer.

Blue denim overalls were the fashion
of 1943.  Bandana covered curls.

They were not all Rosie's.

For some dementia was the result
of too much information. They were
brave in their trembling.

Attachment Disorder began
after the war
when the chidren were born.  

Awed at the

thought

that anyone at all
raced through the
day,
propelled
by the memories,  

of the noise of

the bombings.

The dead,

memories.

Toys flung out of cribs.  
They smoked
they tried to read books.

Several times a day the
War was lost, the real
battle, marriage,
and, for the second time,
the front, was drowning,
There was this OnIy stillness
inside.

They dared to muster the
laundry,
to listen to the
broadcasts from
the other room.

Gained
the rank of Rivetter,

they were received with juice,
drank to the dead and to
those who wished they were.

Caroline Shank
2.18.2022



.



.

Sacrament


Speak to me or don't.  I have heard
your words before.  In silence or in
laughter, suburban sunny spaces
or the city's hidden doorways

with a rush of air
on ******* uncovered
in the rush,
graced only by the statues
purple shadows.

The cautious heaving
from below tells you to be
ready.

Reach for my deepest shadow's
source, mine in me
the whispers of my throat's
taught moan.

Find the sun in my
embrace and in the
strength of my desire
only will we

have  drunk

the sacrament ,

.

Caroline Shank
2.22.22
No

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I? I sit alone
and quietly
reflect.  


Caroline Shank

I saw Sammy one

warm Spring day basking in the

sunshine of my life.


Plop, he jumped as I

sat watching him swim toward

me.  I was hooked.


Spring is a water.

lily shading a guppy.

I felt the shimmer


engulf me that day.

Love was floating by as

I waited for it.



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

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

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

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

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

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

Caroline Shank

To perhaps
remember?

Life lived before.
The leaf circling the
sky. The breeze on
skin.  I know it.

Or I feel it.  The wind
like kisses.
These things

just beyond thought
glisten like oil on the
synapses of experience.

Glimpsed on one
side of consciousness.
Saudade. To be
in the
dream.

To feel nostalgia.
To wonder if

it all might have been

different?



Caroline Shank

The sound of the tenor notes
culled by the expert plying music,
swiping keys and sweat from
the essential melody of the
saxaphone sends me into
the world of the sensual.

I breathe shallowly.  Sigh in
the tender way of notes
brushed against my skin.

I sit in the smoky club as if
alone in my secret self.
Smoke trails from my mouth

as he makes contact.  
The player sees me and
knows my helplessness
as he swings toward me
trailing the sound of his
sax across my waiting lips.

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

I search for
rooms
that are lighted.  
That belong to
mornings.

I have beacons.
I search all the time.

On a
pebbly day.  My feet
run away with
the thought of
tomorrow .

I travel crests
of waves. In storms
I have stones for toes.

I am salvage of an unused
life.  Minutes,
hours, seconds left over

from the lover you
were ...

I run through
cold and
hard
gull screaming thoughts

of city lights and smoky
bars and poetry

unwritten.

Caroline Shank

Summer

The stream trickled on,
the frog jumped in to cool off,
the branch creaked with loss

Autumn

autumn golds the leaves,
the cool breeze stirs the summer's
winding song to winter

Winter

Wind wraps around me,
I breathe in the winter air,
the cold ice crack snaps

Spring

Clouds form.  Cold North winds
toll in.  We run toward Spring,
slide.  You warm in me.



Caroline Shank

Tonight is soft, the Wisconsin
winter's chill is tame and I am
practicing for queen of today.

I am lit inside.  Determined,
I breathe.  My familiar scorn
is put away. I walk the city's
street remembering, the
calming soft breathing.

Tonight is almost over and i
approach tomorrow in silence.
I walk some more in the

chilly drizzle. So soft the shadows
smile back from the store windows.
There are no don't walk signals.

The neon sign in Maxwell's flags
me, lures me inside.
I walk on.  I want to reach the
seventh block.  It's a good
number.  I stop at the gate,
a small park.  I pass it by.

My serenity is a soul sculpture.
No longer a passage in some
one's book. I author me.

Thanks to the moments of
shared caring.

I walk on enthrall of the soft
winds that bring me home.

I am returning to MySelf.

Caroline Shank
1.17.2023

Your shade, ma, follows me like a
loaded red wagon .  You are heavy
with the fruit of your youth.
What were you like as a young
girl fresh in the breeze of
morning?

Did you love your mother?  I heard
her singing in her French
voice.  She folded into life in
Milwaukee, spread into death.
She covered you like a
cowl.

You don't cover me.  You are not
allowed. I never cry for you
and that is your naked
sorrow.

I saw you once crying for your
mother.   Are you together now?

Shades rolled over on
the window of my
days and nights.  

Go away  Ma.  
Run for cover from my
poem's imagination.

Caroline Shank

It's been a long day.  You
died so soon ago and we notice
your noise is gone, the parakeets and me.
You should comment somehow on
the oddness of things
since your disease.

The paranoia and lies the dementia
played made your dreams seem like
waking and your sleep tore into

you with fantasies and confusion.
You shouldered the  nurses by
telling them you felt fine.  That
lie pushed you to more agitaton.

I never knew you would get well.
I was cursed with a colder reality.  
As I drove to see you in the cocoon
of the nursing home I wondered
would you be crying or well.  

It was the crying I never unfolded.
in your room where we so carefully
braided the colors to your whims.
The colors are the same today.

Now wilted, the bright sun's rays
like the daylight dim but your harsh
yellow teeth spread around my
name and you saw me beaten
and unforgiven

You took me with you to the
Hell of brass urns.  I thought
to ask you why but the look
on your framed face said you
were waiting and your yellow
grin dared me to be quiet.

I saw the years in stark
isolation.  
You in a painted slicker,
I knew you
loved me once and
briefly.   Your journey
was a long one. Mine is

to shower daily your burnt
name across the
yellow ******* of

chared Sorrow

off.

Caroline Shank
May 15, 2022
.

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

rib.

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

Called out for your writings,
for the chains of thought

You were
heed less in your

Society

Today's the day for
the bells

to ring. The justice.

Please EXCUSE me

I Abhor the convenient
L

To learn is to
scrape the jug.

of

The Grains

Of conversation

s. No. I cannot
marry you

Like this.






Caroline Shank
06.20.20.2

Is there shelter from this storm?
The neurons rage at the
light that seeps through the
cracks, waiting for the prayer
to form from forgotten words.

The days are short, no more
gaps form between the two
waves of memory.  Gone
on some mornings is the
memory of the time before
the syllables of experience
faded into time.

There are many ways to make
a life over when the buoys
and markers are lost.

I will find you inside
your days and I will hone
your experience into
days you will not miss
and I will cry alone.

Caroline Shank

She Wrote Again

She wrote again. I found her
letters, looking for the storm
of him.  The wind knocked
red hair, the black boots left
outside the door.  I read that

he left on a Sunday, walked
away without his trademark
whistle trailing Oh Shenandoah
behind him.  

The dim days followed.  She
asked everyone, where he was,
his blue eyes a DNA call away
from her.  There was no
response.  

She had no speech left and
the nurses were glad to be
rid of the man in the picture
on her broken table, broken
between the war years and
liberation.

She glanced backwards in
her dementia.  The rough
hewn Sundays, the lost
afternoons.  Her disappearances
not the less tiresome, were
gone.

She wrote letters over the same
paper, shop worn stationery,
over and over.

When she stopped it was on a
sunny afternoon.  No one knew
she left for the day before his
kiss became goodbye, with a
smile of relief.  

Caroline Shank
1.11.2023

Walk the Gulf side
Steals your love and back

The ubitiquos lure of sand dollar,

the caw of the gulls piaint
Statements.

We will make, love.  The vow
is Absolute.

Clouds form a canopy.

Tomorrow's walk will
be another step in
the sea call to us,

love crossed,
We bow

to our loves
own

Destination


Caroline Shank
8.1.2024

My husband would have
told you I was

loud.

He
died then and through my
silence

I mourn the sounds of
his breathing.

I listened to the clouds
whispering
The trees swimming
sounds through my

tears

I scream in my brains
lobular desertion of

reality.

The end of my thoughts...

of

yesterday..

There is no reason
to explain the

desertion

of a life unaware,

of my silence that

now screams for the
end of my tears.

Caroline Shank

Write what I know?  I am pocked with
chunks of broken moments.
Bits fall to the ground, trip me.
The terrain of my youth is a
moonscape.  I know what I know in
the craters of this place.

Born on the darkside and thirsty I was
cold.  I found the sun later when I
was tumbled out the door of my
Mother’s leaking house.  Her screams
had become tentacles of maniacal
music.  Or do not call it music for
if you had heard it you would not dance.

I am old now.  The view from my landing
is filled with sunlight and children,
“There are children in the leaves,
laughing excitedly”.  
I am rescued from this debris on
occasion.

When she is quiet,
I sweep her under the porch
where she lies drunk and unlaughing.
I do not let her out.  Yet she
steers me.  Her corpse loud
in her ***** nightdress.  

The terrain of my old age is pitted
with the debris of this haunting.  She
unsings me, makes me lie in
craters from which I climb up
daily only to tumble back down,
to have to begin again
from the bottom each new **** day.

But I sing as I crawl. And
she does not like the sound of that.

Write what I know?  I am pocked with
chunks of broken moments.
Bits fall to the ground, trip me.
The terrain of my youth is a
moonscape.  I know what I know in
the craters of this place.

Born on the darkside and thirsty, I was
cold.  I found the sun later when I
was tumbled out the door of my
Mother’s leaking house.  Her screams
had become tentacles of maniacal
music.  Or do not call it music for
if you heard it you would not dance.

I am old now.  The view from my landing
is filled with sunlight and children,
“There are children in the leaves,
laughing excitedly”.   (Eliot)
I am paused in this imagination on
occasion.

When she is quiet,
I sweep her under the porch
where she lies drunk and unlaughing.
I do not let her out.  Yet she
steers me.  Her corpse loud
in her ***** nightdress.  

The terrain of my old age is pitted
with the debris of this haunting.  She
unsings me, makes me lie in
craters from which I climb up
daily only to tumble back down,
to have to begin again
from the bottom each new **** day.

But I sing as I crawl. And
she does not like the sound of that

Caroline Shank

It's snowing in flat fat globs.  

The wet from which it is born 

laughs at me.  It knows I

feel alone in my misery of 

winter. 


The cold turns my fingertips

as white as ice.  I must have

injured them sometime.

I stay in the house mostly


and I dream of big spots of 

sun like Florida summers

en *****.


I wait for Wisconsin

to spill it's tulips and

poppies.  I breathe slowly

the gray days of January.


I sit cross-legged alone 

in the icy winter, wake

when warm air permits. 



Caroline Shank

Haiku.    Snow

Winter comes early
The leaves are not yet raked in
The snow covers all.

Soldier


He was perfect at loving me.
He knew the sweet spot.

He walked with me and
He talked with me.

That's a song.  I forget the rest
But i didn't forget him.

He appeared
like A Grace.

He took

A longtime
going away. .  

He left in the
rain.  

I am invisible now,
by your side.

Tomorrow i will write him a letter
and i will Trust.

Tomorrow i will do a lot of things.
Alone i watch him flailing in
the wheat's crease where it

spreads itself on the road.

Love is a sorrow to my
soul.   He is missed
by the flowers we planted.
His memory blossoms,
The pain of this soldier's
retreat opens every night.

Alone

I wear his medals and

rub the shine

of the

gun.



Caroline Shank

Some things are tough.

Some roads are rough.

Some horses are rode

hard and some are

put down wet.


Some lives succeed.

Some lives don't.

Some people strive.

Some people won't.


Some people give up.

Some people slow down.

Some people love.

Some people don't.


Some say the sky is blue.

Some see the colored hue.

I saw Heaven beyond the pale.

clouds, and I saw you.


I saw you in Paradise.

I saw in each other's 

eyes love

in your rainbowed arms. 



Caroline Shank

Sometimes I see you dancing.
Your arms are strong and hold
me up.  I would have
fallen without you, tumbled down
like a doll flung away.

Sometimes I see your strong
walk. You were my bear in the
warm summer of my 27th year.

You are still playing
music in my old age.

Sometimes I see you
dancing
in the night,
in the rain.

Our
song,

floats away

like smoke

in the air that

I breathe.




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