White wine bottle on its side:
lilacs pooling under plate lip
in a sudden, sodden gutter
of roughened moon-cloth...

The ice numbs the wrist;
my name is absent on the list.
Quarries of coffee grounds,
are excavated inside my eye:

names are so clear now,
like glosses of witch-hazel.
But what of the empty iris pit?
Linen flocks against stone,

& memory's evergreen hold
is strong: green queen-needles
mixed with the little pink curls
shaved off the inside of the skull.

Cherish the little triangles of skin
trapped by the dial tone collar:
it's all breaking away.
What is happening to me?

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

white
black

blue

lifeline
noose

I run to you
your rhythm, your beat

for a moment they're mine
and we breathe together,
breathe

I run to you
your hunger, your need

for a moment they're mine
and we cleave together,
cleave

I run to you
your sweet-wet, your greed

for a moment they're mine
and we feed together,
feed

We didn't quite think it through,
did we now?

We just pushed that harrow
even when the fields were underwater.

Now the wires bring us
the yes-no grammar of old love.

Lewd sun, cloud-tumble,
violets dying in the loam:

images lashed to the lens,
the loom, the wine-weave

of the eye... well,
we held on for a while.

Creeping phlox blossoms, star-blanched,
crawl gently in choir in the thunder yard,
like soft fare for the silver river fee.

Linen immortelle, shadow-bleared,
knotted aegis against a raw, wracking world:
smeary cloth-stalks lengthen duskily.

Rain-pinked palm, sloe-blotched:
tawny token of revival from those
who idle beneath rude thunderheads.

We lunch on dust.
We wake, wage our campaigns

of mistakes across a quiet,
wary, unwaving old world.

No greeting, no parting,
no arriving, no leaving -

we are jabs in the air,
crudely curbed animal feints,

& then our names are packed away
& left forgotten in a taxi,

or in a train station bathroom,
or in a fray of rain.

Don't think too hard about it;
that, too, is a mistake.