Somewhere I Started to Cry.

The bus pulled out.

He didn't notice.
There were chunks of
concrete slabs big
enough to hurl.

The last one lands
away from me. I shout!

Tomorrow! The War will end
Tomorrow.
Hold my hands, my mother

is dying.

The phone is ringing out
the news that I am now
Bob Barker's next
contestant.

I'm not given a paddle
or number. My shirt

Is Unwritten.

You came to save me from
the
Hell

Of undone promises.  

Evocation of a snarly
life

at your feet my deah.



Caroline Shank
9.10.2024

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my star to keep.


I see from out my window all
the patterns in the sky merge
for one moment to the sound
of Angels trumpets.

Tonight is the time for kneeling
and watching as the sky turns
dark blue and gives off a light
only once at the stroke of
midnight.  A Star reserved
for you, a motion singular
and unmoving.  And with
a closed eye the Universe
sings.

Caroline Shank

I have never walked here, like
this, before now.  Moist
footsteps follow me as dreams
follow after the
pain when the rains came
finally into the desert.

I have never knelt here like
this before now, by the sand’s
edge where grass grows
like green singing in a scenery
by Dali, perhaps.
This place with its
small hands combs the bodices
of trees. You run
fingers through the desiccated
leaves of my soul, water me.

I have never hiked into the
territory of your country
like this.  Day runs
down my face, drips off
soft moss which is your voice.

But I am here now.  I unfold
this poem of yours as the wind
blows which, when you open your
arms, releases the simple sounds
heard in the branches and leaves
of a friendship whose fertile
landscape grows its own singular,
philodendronous song.


5.1996

Song

I am a metaphor for your loneliness.
Rigged out in sunshine and crowned
with blue skies I am your looked for
ticket to the cotillion.  You never
saw me before the imprimatur
of poetry.

I want to tell you the stories of
my life.  The daring deeds. The
mistakes that you hear in my
voice as a prelude to love.

I am the curlique of madness
that tempts you from the tropic
of yesterday. We were young
and wanton in blue jeans and
rolled hems.  I wore a shirt
emblazoned with your name.

You were perfection in gray
pants and pink shirts.  It was
the 50s and the air sang to us
carrying the music that we
knew as love songs.

We were young then unknown
to each other. Our old souls
were songs as yet unwritten.
Do I confuse you with my
symbols of forgotten requests?

Don't try on my song.   I never
wanted you to.  I am here in
the vocabulary of mistakes.
We cannot find the meaning
In the experience we each had.

Don't look for me to sign.
I am alone in my recent grief.
Don't wait for a sign that
has lost its true North.

You send me flowers which
do not arrive, candy which i
cannot eat.

Tomorrow dies,

as unwritten

song.


Caroline Shank
June 14, 2022

Your song, like fire, burned into
the daylight skies over Mexico.

The cactus words stripped my hands.
These hands which held the
Universe above you for a long
Steel barrel you called Daylight.

I heard you when you said you
loved me, saw you ride away.
The cactus leaked and I watched
Your name form on the sand.
You turned and mixed me with

Jose Cuervo until I was footed
and could say goodbye.
The skies, painted by numbers,
wolfed down the landscape

In which I have been

erased.



Caroline Shank
9.20.23

To whom shall I say
I love you
If not to you?

To my bent head
I close my mind
to paths windings,

And the sun’s bright
light steals the dark
secret of you.

To the nights signature
you lie with me.
I wrap my dreams
as hidden

in the shelf of my
breast.

Not to know this
is my gift to you.

The place upon, where
you
rest is the worn
In me the tragic

song.


Caroline Shank
03.17.2024

I dont want us to evaporate like the
last forlorn drops in the jar. The stuff
you can't reach.  It's when you throw
away the lingering remains of a
once future promise you shake the
meanings off slick with the wetness of tomorrow.

"Some may say I'm a dreamer but
I'm not the only one." You were
promise and gone before I drank
the last dark remains of my beer.
I sang the songs of unbelieving
in the moment before you left me
in the summer's late night rains.

We were spoken of by gods
and goddesses.  The language
was curious and fragrant. Full
and lyrical.  Did you lose their
song?  It was a fabulous song.
I believed in the tune we wrote
together. Tomorrow will fill our
throats with the flattened notes of
a once flying bird.


Caroline Shank
April 28, 2022

Soon I will die or be dead or
seemingly so.  I will not write
this document nor will I ever
be there for Spring has never

arrived.

You, who spent some time under
the tree with me will be gone,
Cynara.

My thin pages swirl from an open
book   I will not care. You, whom
I have never kissed will close the
hamper.  The lake will never be
the color of afternoons
pressed against us

This beach where once we sought
friends colors will bleach this poem

of ever even you.


Caroline Shank
3.3

We dug with bare hands
each to the other.  Sifting
minutes into memory,
language into clover.

We spread our hands
gave life a chance and
the Universe said Yes.

We haven't changed a
minute.  We share the
telepathy of souls,
the candles of passion.

Tomorrows infinite,
reaching into each
other,

roots entwined.


Caroline Shank

I am a slave to the sounds of
poetry. The rhymes of lovers
pledges, the colors of tanned
songs sing to my imagination.  

Poems drape over me like
dresses on women.  I see
colors and patterns reach
with tender fingers. Vowels
touch and with moist
lips, rhyme.

But there are no poems
here in Gilead,
no epic washing away of lines
on the waves of the

final

flood.

Sounds In Silence

Tomorrow comes like a slap
on my cheek.  It waits in the
drains of today like a cat, reaches
for my footstep. Trips me up.

Yesterday slithered into the
cesspool of memory.  I am
a flag in your stand of
cardboard in the window
in Chicago, at the corner
of Rush and State.

Today I set my feet to
find the last place where
the countless clocks struck.

There is no sound in the
Universe today.  All the bells
are open sockets without time.
I am looking for the trigger.

The last walnut cracked under
your weight without warning
and I stand here again

alone.

Caroline Shank
08.27.2023

Southern Days


I almost called you the other day
to remind you I have a birthday
soon and yours is near too.   I
knew you'd be busy and I put
aside my knitting to think about you.

Last year was the trip to Savannah.
I showed you pictures.  Jim died
before we could go back.  I wanted
to include you in my reminiscences.

Tomorrow it is supposed to rain.
I don't do anything on rainy days.
I sit by the window with my tea.
Remember I told you about my
cat. She stays close when she
senses I am looking for you.

I know Jim said you would come
when the sky was gray and I was
lost.  He thought I was lost a lot.
He would ask and there was
never a reply.  He was not waiting
to hear me.

He didn't know that the days of
a fine drizzle were my favorite
days. I watch to see if you are
walking toward me. Your tan, hands

Beautify.. My life with your strong
fingers. Your red hair ubiquity
of the love you left me when
I said no to you Un covered
you said goodbye and then
I died.

The cat knows and she kneads
my shirt.  I stroke her and
call your southern name out
Loud to the mirror of remembering.



Caroline Shank
June 19, 2022


Caroline Shank

clouds form  cold north winds
roll in  we run toward spring
slide  you warm in me

The first inspiration of Spring.
Sunshine patterns the snow
and it is almost March.  The
bird's song is returning and
I am glad to see the
days ignite the flowers under
the garden

paths.

Remove the cold
chill of snow.
The Winter winds blow
for only a while.  I am ready
to be toasted by jonquils
and tulips which reach me
under the tattered cover
of darkness.  The cold
nights bear witness to my
vigil and I wait for

you.

Be mine and I will be the
best of warm on your
red arms.  Dance me to the
heart of Summer.  
We will be the songs of
Midnight

together.

Take me into Summer like
two voices singing.
One note at

last.


Caroline Shank

That say if you stand at Michigan and State
in Chicago long enough you will
meet someone you know.
My mother always said that.

Will I meet you there?  Will you
see the eager young woman you
once knew?  You know, the brunette,
thin, full of your blue eyes looking?

I will stand there for all the years
I have left.  I will shield myself
from disappointment, having forty
five years of practice, I wait
like Penelope.  You have only
to sail your ship to my side.

You are a voyage I can't
complete alone.  Raise your
red sails.  I stand on this
corner to save the life I
once threw away.  


Caroline Shank

How many times have I said
I love you?  Those words to
express that for which words
expire on uttering.  My hands
alone clasp the urgency of
this expression.

I reach for you.  Touch is
explicit.  Your heart responds,
and I am your song.  You
who never sang Sing now.

The feel of love is a reach to
the stage your heart has hidden

in.

I am tactile over my self.

You no longer hear me  
as you have stepped away.
The hours have turned to
days, into years.  More
than 50.

Yet I move. One woman.
hasn't the  power to reach
for your booked and ragged
Goodbye.  

But I will go on because
something turns me that
way.  Like a spiral whose
Need is to turn toward
the sun.  

You illumine my life with
the memory that once you
touched me,
spelling the future
I declined so many
times.

I cannot walk away.  This
strophe will not
stop,

the message is in my

stride, without
you now
I am chorus

to the

play.

Antistrophe
for the gods

amusement.


Caroline Shank
2.12.2023

.

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

Caroline Shank

Is it too late to watch the
To see the
cracked burns
of the elderly

the disappointed vocals
of the women in
petticoats


It's a game, Eric
The stringy sounds of
Yesterday. A calliope
Of Summer's by the beacň.

Hold my hand Mr soldier
if you can, take the whisper
of those who read the lips of
those who, like me,
slide it down your pants

To Hell


Caroline Shank
06.20.2024

Summer Night

It's a quarter after six, on an August
evening of my 76th year.   I drink
a sherry.   Here,  my feet
are free of the socks I insist on
wearing,  I am smoking.

The entertainment
for tonight is planning tomorrow.

Tomorrow is the last mention of
Summer.

You took me into custody, left
my life's belongings behind.
Sans identification,  sans valuables,
sans feeling.

Now there is only the zeitgeist of
this age.   The long lobes of wise men
and the sagging ******* of yesterday.
I write in cursive so you will have
to talk to me.  

I am the last syllable of my family.
The seventies remain as a bastion
of understanding.  Do not blame

me for remembering you.

I have forgotten many things but not the warm Summer night.   It creeps over me like your

hand.


Caroline Shank
8.15.2022

It's a quarter after six, on an August
evening of my 76th year.   I drink
a sherry.   Here,  my feet
are free of the socks I insist on
wearing,  I am smoking.

The entertainment
for tonight is planning tomorrow.

Tomorrow is the last mention of
Summer.

You took me into custody, left
my life's belongings behind.
Sans identification,  sans valuables,
sans feeling.

Now there is only the zeitgeist of
this age.   The long lobes of wise men
and the sagging ******* of yesterday.
I write in cursive so you will have
to talk to me.  

I am the last syllable of my family.
The seventies remain as a bastion
of understanding.  Do not blame

me for remembering you.

I have forgotten many things but not the warm Summer night.   It creeps over me like your

hand.


Caroline Shank
8.15.2022

Do people take car rides
anymore?  Is the cost too
high?

We would spend Sunday's
in the car exploring the
streets and lanes, farms
and small lakes or streams
around northern Indiana.

The weather was always
a wash of sunlight on barns,
small grassy paths, cows
and chickens lowing and
crowing.  

We would stop for a minute,
kiss as if we belonged to the
shade from the trees and
chatter of the singular little
brooks outside the car.

It was always gentle on
Sunday.  The car seemed
to know where to go. I
would slide across the front
seat and with my head on
his shoulder sigh, forgetting
the hundred pages of
Shakespeare that waited
patiently to keep me up

late into the night, the verbs
to conjugate for Monday.
They could wait. I remember
I loved to inhale the music
of the spring.  

A symphony
played as we rolled down
the windows of our pleasure.

Caroline Shank

Sunlover


I lay out there nearly naked.
You are warmth and touch and
kiss.  My pores open, yield
juices that color me the shades
of heat; the browns of new-
chewed leather.  Your breath
rubs me.  Gentle undulations
thrill my almost open and ever
waiting body.

But you cannot reach me where
it counts.  Oh, would I give myself
naked, your lover, exposed.  I
would be unafraid.  As it is I
look in the glass at your outline,
rub the places for you, reaching
for the juices you should
lick but don’t.


Caroline Shank

Sunshine on bare ground.  Acorns
fall off live oaks.  The shade
creeps where last year flowers
grew.  The planet is off its axis
and I am alone.

No language leaves splats where
before the sunlight shone in a
poem of great beauty.
Tears now nurture time's
becoming.

Trust the only thing that has been
ever true.  Goodbye has many
leaves.   It yields stones among
the twigs, fruit that is puny
and wee.


Caroline Shank

The syllables of conversation
scatter like Shore stones.
The Gulf prefigures you
as a dream prefigures the

child.

Salt water runs through our
toes as we walk. There are
birds and wind like kisses
lick the sides of yesterday

when the screams of love

reached

Heaven.


Caroline Shank
7.6.2024

Have I told you about
the Summer of 74, my
steamy discontent?

There I was, waiting,
like someone waiting.
An empty dance card.
So to speak.

I forget my next thought,
but never those yellow
evenings,

Moments float into a
filled mouth we breathe
into each other, wanting
always waiting.
I keep them in the Chinese box.
Your souvenir of an abandoned
July.

The sweet soft

song lasting in amber grained
wood.  

Your words on my kissed lips.

The perennial intimacy
in the upstairs room you
slept in.

Now the warm night's tango
slides like lotion down
my tanned thighs.

This dance is always,
forever.

Caroline Shank

There you go again
scaling the walls of
my scarred and forked
emotions.  I cover the
limbs which you have
not as yet noticed.

I hear you chanting.
I shiver as you dance
around the soft underbelly
of yesterday.

If I could tell you that
which I know to be
true would you stop
your blue colored cry
to be love touched?

Could we but begin the
music again?  I don't know
what the years of our separation will bring, I only know
that we are soft
sound on skin.

Tango me esta noche.


Caroline Shank

Have I told you about
the Summer of 74, my
steamy discontent?
The suicide that fell
from the dusk of your
goodbye?

There I was, crumbling,
like someone crying
in the empty midnight.
Erased of sound, i
waited, with a sorry
silent cry.

I forget my next thought,
these aged dry days
but never those early
yellow evenings,

Moments float like a
remembered kiss into
a filled mouth.
We breathed
into each other, wanting
always promising.
I keep them in the
Chinese box. Your
souvenir of an
abandoned July.

The soft song lasting
in amber grained wood.  

Your words there
on my kissed lips.

The perennial intimacy
in the upstairs room you
slept in.

Now the warm night's tango
slides like lotion down
my tanned thighs.

This dance is forever.


Caroline Shank

I dream too much.  I have an
imagination the size
of a planet.
I stay up all night, sleep
like a cat.  Watch movies
on the TV.

I sink and rise and
sink again. Dream
sporadically
of you.  

I think of
past loves.  
It's what getting

old does to me.  You are
the audience for my poems.  
Language is unspoken.
I doze until

Six A.M. when all
my senses call me
to beware.  The night
is hiding and my
thoughts fade into
daylight.

I am on the way
to yet another
dream.

You are the
music.

Tango me tonight?


Caroline Shank

The yard.
The wide green yard.  
The rooster lifts his
trumpet to the Lord.  

There is the song
he practiced for the
sermon.  The choir off the
fence.  The Duck plashed
and the piggie counted
down.

The Serenade, his song
of Songs.  

The chicks wait
as they
we're told to do.

Billy's coming home.

The wooden fence is
cleaned.  
His flag draped.

The song
ready.

Billy fell in the ditch of
Unknowing.  

His war
over.  

The Rooster cries,

Taps.


Caroline Shank

Stones.
Blue dancer.
On a beach
reach
Welcome.

Tomorrow's
Light
The.
Star is

bku+líyhú
In other
words
Loved killed
My mother

Scraped shoe.
Arsenic is
4.0 on
A scale of
death;   b bb bb;

Tomorrow's
Tattoo

**** up.
I am. Alone.

Tattoo
You said?


Caroline Shank
10.3.2024

Tell me


again about flush toilets and hot
water.

I want you to keep it up,  I
sit and sit and “think about

it.
How good my life is.
.
Tell Me stuff of legends.
How God is good.

How love is to one's soul
as rain helps the Garden
    Grow.

Beat It into my failing
feeling.  The heart is
only prescribed to the



Foolish.

Tell Me Again


Tell me to stop weakening
with each flash of you.
Each belly flop of

your caring.

My turn at sublimation
leaves tears on my vocabulary.

To be Wise for you  is to be
as the lonely clef

under songs.

Daylight drives me cold
into

the
Lonely

Night


Caroline Shank
January 9, 2025

So long ago.    
I was always older than you.
You were stronger than I.
It was Summer, you rolled
joints in the kitchen.  I
waited in the other room.

Other rooms, other tales.
I remember the night
we walked to the tavern.
I wrote poems while you
played pool.  I wore red,
you touched my
hand.  I didn't know you,
stranded on the brink of
midnight, waiting for me
to end the song.  

You left me in the rain,
toeing the brush of your
dense backyard.  I called,
my voice thrown in the
rain, the wind's song
tortured with the sound
of tears.

This Thanksgiving.
I will drink alone,
long ago yesterdays,
linger to
tomorrow.

Caroline Shank

This is the doctor's waiting room.  
Can you smell the antiseptic mixed
with the cigarettes everyone
smoked when I was a young girl.

The office had a funky smell.
There were lots of magazines and
always the Reader's Digest.
Sometimes I sit alone in the
pine paneled room, waiting..
My mother was never there.
Daddy tried to cope with all the
collosal wastes of time.
He worked hard
in the city. You know about my
mother already.  And the Dr.

The Dr was the only adult who
listened to me for much of my
Youth, it seems to me.
That was because of the Dr. Jane
novels I read over and over.

This catechism of lies
satisfied me. No not the Baltimore.
I know you thought of that
first thing.  This teaching taught
me to not say no to drunken

boys.  It told me this festering
resentment that took hold
of me then was never
a dream.  The poems of
romance and the failure that tried to
drip down my life sap into soil.

This Frustration
always was Magnified by
the mixture of gin and
the lost virginity at 15 to
a backseat ****.

The years have shown the lies
little girls chatechyse.  Except when
I had pneumonia.  

Later he said I was still too
ugly to go to school.  So I went
into the maw of my sixteenth
year.  I cinched my waist of
failures to my secret self.

Then I found out he was wrong.
Somewhat wrong.   I finished
with life at this point and waited for
you to reinstate the proscenium. That
was how I saw it.  Remember
how I cried when they played "the
Lion Sleeps Tonight?   It is the
song of decimation, of the Nihilism
you don't like me arguing with you
all the time.

My life is a tale you don't have
listen to. Careless, incipient,
amniotic dreams of an old
woman you just made love to.



Caroline Shank
2.17.22

That song, that miserable song
will never go away.  That night, the dark night of my soul, is not able to sleep. The pounding of the sound of it breeching the television speakers sends be
back in time.

You know what I mean? The
remnants of a teenage memory
is a sorry stream.  I wake up
every day not knowing if I
will be in that backseat, again. The Lion is awake
and my hands shake with
your memory.  

I am all alone in the space
between reality and nightmare.
My toes touch the floor of the
car, my hand disappears into
the upholstery.  I thought you
liked me.  Funny that.  

The Lion slept all night and
when he woke up he laughed.
My throat ached with the sound
of his roar, the music wimowaying on the radio and I was alone in that crowded
backseat.  

The jungle, the mighty jungle,
rained and the laughter of teenage boys circling the
beat up car smelled of stale
beer and the sodden remains
of my fourteen year old's illusions

died.

Caroline Shank

Everything reminds me of that short
summer.  The clouds form in ancient swirls of fine candy.  Stick candy.
The Wisconsin breath on my
neglected face still summons the
memory.

Proust has already penned his memoir.

I have as yet been unmined.
You remain like an effigy
on the razor edge of sanity.

I feel the hot hand of our past
rub along the night we
loved and smoked and
loved some more.

The days we were loosed on
the city we held the yellow
breath of anticipation.  

We walked

into night when the dark
fallen Angel laid her hand
on times cruel cudgel
and struck us apart.

The music I hear is the
remaining notes of a still dark
lift of dance.

The touch of you is a reply
in only every breeze.

Caroline Shank

The fires are determined to rub
out the names.  The paths of
thousands of years.  Gone.
The Great Aboriginal voices
are spread thickly through the
ash.

Tomorrow is irrelevant.  The
peace pipes are gone.  The fires
littered.   The White faces cross
California.  The scores are
zero.  The scorched ground
bereft.  

There is a song sung in sadness
among the stumps of sacred trees.
There is a wail from the White
souls.  The Indian sorrows whisper
sympathetically.  

Alone in the smoke.  Our
children dare to rebuild.  Hand
in hand the Ancestors applaud.

Caroline Shank

You are lost to the waking world, a
denizen of the darkness.  I pry my
fingers from off the steel lock.  You
risk the deeping years, the early

yellow springing world laid for you
from my body.  I talked to you in the
corridor of my youth. You only tried
me for.a moment. You took the
pages of my determination and
threw them over the brick lined
walls of your selfness.

You made me witness your dance.
The song you sang, your lyrics
beneath my pillow, the
voice of ancestors not heard until
your music escaped the fences.

My mother did not live to dance
with you.  The songcoated signal
escaped between  your
incomprehensible affinity.

The dance of genetics in full
display.  I am still the Baffled.
The one footed dance  of
the broken, the chondral song
played every evening.

Go behind the schoolyard where
you and the lions of your
collective urges vye to be
the fitest ****** on the block.

My life is short now with my own
kicked addictions. I drowned in
the lake of desire. I have swum
the frigid surf and walked away.

You are not unique. Many sear
the letter of desire across their
bare forhead and cannot traverse
the concourse of the day.  

I will not declare myself aroung
your wheel. I walk through Grace.
If you choose me kneel for the
Benediction of God.

Caroline Shank
5.28.22

I wait for the blue hour.
The time to open the story
into the dusk of
regret.

I am ready to read and
lose myself.  Blue touches
black.

I’m a hungry type of person.
I hang my coat on the tree
and walk into the kitchen

The same kitchen where you
used to drink coffee with me.
The same green walls with
yellow flowered wallpaper.  
Do you remember?

No?  You were
always looking at me as if
I were the only character in
your book.  You knew you
were my whole library.  I
could cover you with
my crying eyes and
you would be there,
in my world, forever.

Marry me
you said but I was
married.  You charged
into the tomb of night.

And I cannot lose
the exquisite pain of
those final pages?

  
Caroline Shank

There is  something in the
air that moves me forward
always off balance, as a
thought glances by me and
is quickly forgotten.  

There is a law someone
never told me.
When I was younger I lived
unbothered by the whims
and movements of change.  
Now I cling, precariously,
to a life untethered.

I see my lorn form
change in the whisp
of a moment.

Regardez moi,
je pleure



Caroline Shank

The cinders under my bare feet
jabbed me in my hurry to the
beach.  The path down from
the street to Silver Lake was
short but painful.  I rushed
running to the shore.

I learned to swim from a wonderful
lifeguard.  From 1st to 2nd to 3rd
rock I spent the summer of my 10th year swimming in the freezing
spring fed lake.

I swam flat out like a fish.  
I listened for his whistle under
water.  Come up,  he summoned me to the top.  I shimmered like a
shook trout in my rainbow eagerness.

I was a pebble unknowing
that my fate washed me up on
the shore
the day I felt the first young
flung feelings of love.

I shot through the ends of
latency like a star.
I never felt it ringing.



Caroline Shank

In this circus of the mind,
you are the dreamraker, the
seller by the booth of riches.
You are the daylight’s yellows
and the blue stratum of sleep.
We knew each other in the
shadowless angle of noon,
bartered minutes, collected
seaside the shells of
poetry.  You opened the door of
tents.  The edges of the sand’s
various galleries collapsed
into rivers, opened into books.
You are the sheik of araby, the
dream-maker, the purples
mornings brush in the eyes
of wise men.

Dreams surrounded the day’s
median.  Time was, red was the
color of afternoons pressed
against us.  Now the tents
move nearer the water than
you.  The past is covered
canvas, the future is the wet
unbroken fabric of beach.

The bazaar closes, tents fold,
pictures painted on the moon’s
memory move on.  You and I
walk to the uncut littoral,
carve footprints in the cool
green silence, the first morning
of the world.

Caroline Shank

the Queen and the Prince
married in splendor regaled,
the long autumn begins.

The Dead


They waft through.
The end brushes their faces.
Reminiscent of
leaves blown against
vegetable skin.  The
landscape soaks with,
saturates with, this
growing out of season.  
Weeds rise from the inside,
and like vines, scale interior
walls, crumble stone, hiding
in the cracks while rooting
for the breast of destruction.


Lives are spread out.
Spilled flowers, and at
the last it all lay written
across the years when the
pulsing, fecund ending, still
in pieces was unfolding
in the weeds.


You don’t know nuthin’ folks.
They wait like children who
know exactly when to get into
locked gardens the mothers
left for a minute for
groceries or shopping, for
a cocktail, meaning to return,
only to linger over the
afternoon.

If you gasp folks in the
second before reality finds
you counting your blessings,
you never looked them in
the face, never saw the
wind part the sky in front
of them, never touched the
ivy stuffing the holes,
where the sadness milks into.


Go home, the dead have
already bloomed.  You can’t
find them in the landscape
of their ends if you have
to ask.  You never knew that
Death which, on the ground,

blows around our faces.


Waits.







5. 14.92

Revised 7.25.24

Beloit Poetry Journal  rejected 7/14/91
The Limberlost Review rejected 8/15/92
The Little Magazine rejected 1/23/93

They won't come back to me,
The dreams.
Fine lines of memory.

I dreamt of you recently.  I
kissed you,  I don't know
where we were but the taste of
you mouth took me
away to the beach of
winds.  The
warm sand.
Soft summer skin.

I lay over sleep  like
a coat
I hide in memories.

Return to me.
The night stretches
and reaches
for you.

I wait again, me,
holding onto the ashes of
love.  


The
night elongates,
that song.
We danced.

I dream of you and the
past lives again. Lights
silver me.  For the time you
hold me I SURRENDER.

Softly.
I walk in your footsteps..

Still.

The detritus of sleep  

remain scattered.

Caroline Shank
November 29 2021yy





They won't come back to me,
The dreams. They curl.
Fine lines of memory.

I dreamt of you recently.  I
kissed you,  I don't know
where we were but the taste of
your flavored mouth took me
away to the beach of
winds and seagulls.  The
warm sand. Your
soft summer skin.

I lay over sleep  like
a coat
I hide in memories.

Return to me.
The night stretches
and reaches
for you.

I wait again, me,
holding onto the ashes of
love.  Burnt.

The reels of
night elongate,
That song.
We danced.

I dream of you and the
past lives again. Bright lights
silver me.  For the time you
hold me I surrender utterly.

Yellow burns. Softly.
I walk in your footsteps..

Still.

The detritus of sleep  

remain scattered.


Caroline Shank




…

That was a different dream, not the one last night where you couldn't
get the door unlocked.  The other
dream was when we walked east
on Capitol Dr. toward the water.

We explored the caves,
the hidden grottos of Lake
Michigan.  We walked so far with
torn experience and
unforgiven memories.  The sky
dimmed in the late afternoon.
We tried to reach each other
in the fading red moments before
awakening.

Last night you couldn't get to me.
The locks were made up of the
Crucifixion and a nun kneeled
before me.  You were frocked
out in gray and threw kisses.

We woke in the same bed where
you vanished quietly to your
whispers of regret.
I remain unseen and unloved.
A torrent of feeling sprang from my
soft and sorry, lonely gray bed.

Caroline Shank

There are things
I did not do.

I did not  touch
you.  

You
died. Without
a sound.

Your soft brown eyes pierced me.
I saw you go in the quiet
way you did everything.
I knew you were gone
but not before I
knew sadly, silently
that
I
could not hold
you in a final

embrace.

Closeness had run out
so long ago,

though we loved until the end,

bereft of speech,
as we we were bereft of
touch.

I bowed to your
blank stare.

I would have died for
you if I could have.  

but I could not
save you from
this destiny

with the Father

Who

Loved

you



Caroline Shank
2.2,2023

You scorn the soliloquy
of my sadness.  The
ubiquitous wind of
Poetry.

But
I always thought the person to
love me would occupy
the spaces between  breathing.

That there, against words,
would be warmth and solace
from the years of loneliness.

But you did not risk my
poem's breathing.

Tomorrow I will go away to
where the disturbed vowels
tell of my reason.
I am the author
of my destiny.

You cannot bear
the blur of my tears
the cry of my years,
the sound of  broken
clefs,  
where once we sang.

I will trace the
notes of this diary,
across the pages of
time.

Alone, again
naturally. 🎼.




Caroline Shank
2.7.22

I am the mother of my

youth.  I cry in places 

no one knows. 


It was the sunline to

Alabama that made

all the difference. 


I closed the 70's with

a bang. 


Today 

I enter this

decade mute.


My white hair falls

to the floor, my bent

back bent by the years.


I knew it would

end like this: 


alone,


by the tree. 



Caroline Shank

1.1.20

I've started walking with a cane.
I'm like an old broken soldier.
Under the sofa are parts that do
not fit in rusty sockets.  New
loops and strings cannot

put
me
together.

I missed muster again and
got the letter.

I am
not required
at table

any more.

I spend my days twirling parts
left over from first rounds.
My springs boing hollow
and I don't
see well at night.

What will happen
to
me
now
that I have
seen the moment
of my greatness
flicker?

(I can still
quote Eliot.)

I want you more to
more than move me,
you starting my gears
and I overflow with

Purpose.

Your attention goes
and
I

no longer

see my any
self
at all.


Caroline Shank
2.07.2023

It ain't gonna happen
no more

Ain't gonna be no kissin'
No nor maple tree.

Tomorrow ain't gonna

tell my story
'cause I ain't gonna
see no love'n

Cause you gone and
died away from

me.

There is a favor I called
in, a moment before

you died and the glass
covered your eyes.

I am not singing in the
Chorus.  The Angel's
practice better and

the music calls

your sacred singing
Baritone

No More


Caroline Shank
12.14.23