I read today about a cat in Texas
who was found screaming

& blind, face signed with blood,
rescued under a sun that crawled

through eyelids: flitting, slitted rays.
Small, anguished emblem:

stretched outside the manse,
abandoned by mother and father,

stray, stitched to solitude,
straining to understand.

We are as you were.
O little cat, sweet-armed giants

resolved your misery.
Go chase your little whorls

even as this scant planet
whisks through galaxies

steered by obscured titans.
Behold, friend:

your joys slice at the silence
that once ate afternoons.

I am the Empire in the last of its decline,
That sees the tall, fair-haired Barbarians pass,--the while
Composing indolent acrostics, in a style
Of gold, with languid sunshine dancing in each line. -Paul Verlaine, "Melancholy"


I am the Empire, in decline.
The elm tree is yellowing;
the rain-arm is broadcasting
from the cloud station.

I am the once-loved voice,
now a tired smear of memory;
the ghost of a market thrill,
a bed of smoke, a red register.

I am the Barbarian, grown fat
after the stuttering blonde pyres
are stilled: finger-flickers of ash.
I am the white noise nocturne

after the rerun is over.
I am the cathode ray,
the scent in the glass.
I am the Empire, in decline.

is a circle.
The
minefield of
breathing.

I inhale.

The rasp of a door

hinge.

Gone to rust.

Pieces of
time.

Jigged thoughts…

clang of
chains.

Soggy Days.

Lie wet
leaves.

Rain..

The air pushed.

Behind me a
young woman

falls.


Caroline Shank
9.24.22

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