Pandemic


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

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

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

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

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

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

Caroline Shank


Prompt:. Covid-19

Panic spins.
I am a dervish without
a prayer.

Air pounds in my chest.
Sound is a slap.  
Thought is scrambled.

Breathless is a **** in my
stomach.  Flight is the
option.  Feathers fly.

The air is sand, filled,
unbreathable.
A storm screaming.

A rope
chokes me
into another
space from which
I fall disgraced.
.
Recovery is a movement
of clarity I receive from
your

lips on my

hands.

Caroline Shank

I am bent in half, sitting in my
chair.  My arms are covered with
crawling things.  My face itches.
My folded feet are cramped.

My stomach is collapsing and
my lungs gasp for air. I walk
upright so you won't hear
the breaths that tear ever so
quietly from the deep place
where terror thrums the
center of me.

I get up everyday
to the steel strings of my
unconscious.  My head
listens for something
I cannot hear.

Panic, like a guitar,
strums in my gut.  
It plays me and
I shake.

I pick this up, my
shattered life,
and I go on…

Dear Jesus, I go on…


Caroline Shank

Tomorrow creeps, no wait the
Bard already used that line.
Let me say that tomorrow slings
it's way into me. It's like an
arrow from the Promised Land.
Tomorrow whips across me. I
wipe the sweat of it with
a damp hand.

Panic wets me like rain.  It
waits for tomorrow which,
collides with today and my
fists ball in terror.  Sleep
never soothes this breast,
it barely makes it in the front
door.

I breathe deeply, or try to.
What will help is greatly
misunderstood.  A prescription
for today to stop tomorrow.
Which will slam me to the
floor anyway.

I shake myself awake.  

It is always today.
I stumble on.

Caroline Shank

Tomorrow creeps, no wait the
Bard already used that line.
Let me say that tomorrow slings
it's way into me. It's like an
arrow from the Promised Land.
Tomorrow whips across me. I
wipe the sweat of it with
a damp hand.

Panic wets me like rain.  It
waits for tomorrow which,
collides with today and my
fists ball in terror.  Sleep
never soothes this breast,
it barely makes it in the front
door.

I breathe deeply, or try to.
What will help is greatly
misunderstood.  A prescription
for today to stop tomorrow.
Which will slam me to the
floor anyway.

I shake myself awake.  

It is always today.
I stumble on.

Caroline Shank
10.27.19

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

For what are we to do?
Knowing this?

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

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

But,

I bloom for you.

Caroline Shank

Patterns

The first bell tolls
White noise in the
green dawn.

Are you awake? The daylight
throws up on the rug images
of time refracted.  The
shape of bodies
satisfying a long cry.

Peace slips under the
door, spreads like an oil
stain,  

Time becomes the Apple
Tree.  The future is
truncated.  You walked

away

and I, I lay across the
weather and bury my

head.

Your poem covers me

Like

     a

       shroud.


Caroline Shank
6.18.2014

Can I ride on the
colors of your conversation
to the door of tomorrow?

Can I glide slowly away
from the syllables of your
wisdom and philosophy?

Can I go now? leaving you
my soul on your plate?

Caroline Shank

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

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

Do you remember
your hands on my face?

Personne ne se souvient

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



Caroline Shank

She tripped over you in a
final wave of surrender.

You said
   meet me where

The white cloth waves

in the air,
today's laundry.

Time's stretch limp

       unworn

clock’s hands.

Future stopped in the
U.nticking

The lie in bleach is

rinsed .

Love lives in the

shadow....

Tomorrow.will be
a
      concept

w.rapped in a

fantasy.


Caroline Shank
January 4, 2025

Philos:

The question of

existence has
recently fallen into
the house of

insignificance.

You have no tiles to hang,
no metaphysics to
conjugate.  I am substance.

Actuality.  The froth of
conversation opened
into the accident
of birth.

Remind me. of last
night.  The
bedsheets are stretched.
The conversation of
sheep, grazed on
the syllabed

Of significance.

We love in the green
Over lament of
Civility.

You are the brand.
I am the name
that shail

never be

Spoken

Caroline Shank

Forty five years gone by and still
the dust motes
fly from the philosophy you casually
taught her.   She paid attention and now
the syllables of Truth are battered
and worn. Your truth Ben.  You were
her  wheel steering corners of her mind
onto streets of pure reason.

She sat in jeans and tee shirt,
wrote vessels of your words
and swatted her feelings around
your black hair.  She could not
get enough of the meal and
wealth of your knowledge.

All that is left is you
crying into the phone that
you might lose her.
She who was so new
and young.

You left a message, cold
as ice.  You were gone
and she was never to
understand
your soggy
remarks.  The risk was
like magma, you never
came too close again.

You taught her truth
and slammed her
against the wall of
your ambivalence.


Caroline Shank

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

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

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

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


Caroline Shank

Plath wrote in a frenzy
just before she died.
She put all of the world's she held
so fragile into the sauce she

brewed in the London of her
despair. Her last thought was
Daddy.

Another ten years.

She was to complete her
poem's anniversary tome.

Plans fail.  

Au pair arrived
to no one answered the bell.

Plath, while her babies
napped,

waited.

She never knew.


Caroline Shank

I'm tired she said as she drifted
away to the sky of someone
else's blues. The sun of pure
understanding regaled her
until her sentence ended.
Oh God of desperate climes

rescue her before the clifs
of lost dreams win and
she dies in her dreams.

Caroline Shank
1.11.2023

With all your expert mouth and
tongue of many tribes you
call me to the dance floor
of your poetry.

I ear your accent, I tongue the
vowels of your incredible name

which blossoms every morning.
I bed to your brown eyes when
touch begs rest from incessant
breathing.

You are wheat chaff and I am
the wind which blows over the dead dreams of aged memory.

I understand now the satiety
of your love.  The desert of
uncertainty where the bridge
of your wanderings
crossed my month
of ecstasy.

You are the list I take to
mind's far places when
thoughts of you are

exhausted.


Caroline Shank

I could be dead by tomorrow,
wrapped in the comfort of
silence. Spread out on the
floor of yesterday.  I loved
you so many years ago there
is a calm scrape on the days
meridian.

I turn myself in for being
ridiculous.  " Do I dare to
eat a peach? ". I cross the
sandpaths of memory and
kick the castles yesterday
left.  No tomorrow for us.

I, like Prufrock, dizzingly
look for the summer night,
walk unsteady in my old
age lest I die to finally

and forget.

Caroline Shank
1.20.2023

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

I have pages of prayers.
assimilated.  I saw them
yesterday.
I've
Clipped them together
with a
yellow butterfly.

Some
I wrote myself.

On nights I would
sit reading, lonely.
Days there,
were~~ sounds

remembered,~~
of music
coming always
from a farther room.

I meditate.  I fly off
to places where we
made love long ago.

You were love's young
dream.  I, a reflection.
always,the Other
side, a mirror's
back.
~~
Unreflected.

Incomprehensible.

A dichotomy
interrupted.


Caroline Shank
January 25, 2025

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

Remember Me

Light is falling through the
Sleeves of my longing.

That's pretty good.  You
take me into the grotte
of imagination.  You

Nudge me
And I grapple with the
silence of rhymes.

Long was the life
time spent in the

whorle of loving.

The verbs I write
at all in the shadow where
my desk rests on the
faux brick wall are quiet

against the window curtain.

And I breathe.

Not all poetry calls you to
me as Sara writes. It's
the literature of my life

as I walk alone on the
beach where we stood

and Kissed that last
Night

The waves off Sarasota
splashed against us

The gulls screeched.

Taps sounded in the
night’s wind..

And I am fragile. I
sleep late and stay
out of the sun.

You may remember my
face.  

My stumble.

The last morning of

the

World.


Caroline Shank
February 12, 2025

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

Reunion

One bright day, in the middle
Of July two great loves
Got up

to Fight.

There were no more

Kisses.

One Great Love waited
while the other
Spit on his hands
      And went back to work.

It's the heat that makes me

Crazy.

I am fertilized with the
salt of years.  


I

Sadness has

Accomplish

So long ago a time.

That time has scratched

you

like a tattoo

onto the outline of my
body..

I remain in my old age

Yours to do
With me some
things

Where there is little time
for hand candy

Or

Tears.


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

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

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

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

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