"Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as I am possible
then marriage would be possible--
Like SHE in her lonely alien gaud waiting her Egyptian lover
so I wait--bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of life."
-Gregory Corso, "Marriage"


To Whom It May Concern:

Three years ago I was supposed to marry
for a third time, but disease came
& courts closed and the house of cards
began shaking: aces are thin.

Two years ago it ended savagely
as I was packing my things for Dublin,
looking up how to get the cat on the plane,
when she texted: scalpels are thin, too.

I began drinking. Not like the books say -
the lonely poet sipping sherry in a turret,
in a black cape with a quill in hand -
no, ugly cups of scotch at eight in the morning.

The whisky brought my grandfather's body
from the past and forced it onto me -
I stopped recognizing myself
in the poisoned mirror. I sold the house.

I bought a new place, in an artist's neighborhood,
I went for long walks, I purged some bad blood.
But the heart ran down like a forgotten watch.
I felt tarnished. I felt like I died years ago.

Now whenever a poem slips out of me,
I am dismayed. The world around me
reflects endlessly a cascading loneliness,
a disappointment, an uncertainty,

& it's all I can talk about because looking in,
breaking the lacre, is unbearable most of the time.
Clouds sing and perish in the new night;
when day comes, it's sodden, sealed, sunless.

I don't know where else to go with this letter,
so I will scrawl my fingers across the clatter
& go lay down. The street is spotted:
It's starting to rain.

v/r, E-

I.

Your fingers raking
through chestnut wreaths
gapped with gloss:
the wind mussed your hair

into a sudden wild shape,
& the canal was glowing
like a runaway filament
in the buttery dusk.

You had gone quiet inside,
months before.
You slipped a spider's lyric
under my tongue.

Summer was really winter,
& winter was a belt cinched
around a hopeful throat
crawling with clouds.

II.

I'm not good on my own.
I drink too much,
I have terrible dreams,
I don't move for hours, days.

Stars bleach me, pierce deep
into a plastic rib space.
Old friends get married,
get pregnant, go invisible.

I turn on the charm,
a smile pooling amid
the pink. Whisky
floating over two tongues...

Was I supposed to make a move?
I missed a cue, somewhere.
I feel my insides lurching
like sun-broken snow.

They're all dead, the men who
loved me in the backseat or
on the water bed.  Or not.
Or mostly.

Bless please the memory
of warm nights and street
lights.  The rock and
roll of hips blinded by
loves.  The music

of traffic going by.


The voices of love in
the night.  Rhythm
me now.


I loved the rhyme of hips,
the Song of
Throats rolling and
sibilant.  

Ghosts who haunt me.
Let us pray.

Come to me tonight.
Rescue me from

long nights with the

Lamp's signal's

Flash incessant.


Caroline Shank
12.6.2022

There I am, in the cold glass:
looking back at my half-self.

Beyond me, my neighbors bundle
in and out of their kitchens,

parcel from bedroom to bathroom
in their sweatshirts, pajamas,

their old night clothes.
I just watch from a black shell

that fumes and blossoms
with hasty glasses of *****.

I sit in the dark because
there is no one who will visit -

I feel bones under the skin.
I feel how thin it all is.

I gave myself away for years, but
the lights are all snapped off now,

even the gaslights are turned off.
Streetlights rescind their beams.

My neighbors never look back out
into the street. Their eyes are flattened

with yesterdays and tomorrows.
Their yellow squares go low.

We, all of us, hear the song that slips
from the moon pocket, calls the frost.

I.
Your words
are starry, lush,
crawling over quiet
amaranth pages in the air -
"don't go."

II.
Hundreds
of lights are smeared
like yolk by a long hem
of thunderheads that are hunting
eastward.

III.
I dream,
sometimes, about
the old lawns in Dublin:
the last time I felt clear and free.
What now?