A shadow spread over us
as we lay there in the fields.

It ate flower, grass, and hill
with ohaguro teeth.

The world was soft and chilled
in the belly of the shadow -

we hid our hands
under each other's shirts.

When it moved we chased,
laughed among blonde furrows,

stumbled in the gritted ruts -
but it was gone. I think

we both know what it meant.
Where are you, now?

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

Been talking about you lately,
the pint glass you slung at my skull

in your attempt to ****** me.
We ate the thigh of night

& demanded seconds;
not satisfied, the next day

we stole away from our desks
& kissed on the prow.

Webs of reddened light,
black-gapped fingers like antlers,

God, how we thirsted for it all.
Hair across your brow,

rain against the runny glass,
it was quiet for a moment,

but just a moment,
just a moment.

"Wealth is lent us, friends are lent us,
man is lent, kin is lent;
all this earth's frame shall stand empty."
-The Wanderer (anonymous, late 800s or early 900s, as translated by Michael Alexander)

To hell with all of it:
shove sun away,
bury a moon in a drawer.

Let lovers lend a mouth or breast:
we beetle down our daily work,
lulled to amnesia by the churn.

Our meal of the world is so brief:
televisions smear us with static,
while the sky dwindles to a scream.

"All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts"
-Shakespeare, As You Like It

Panic flocks to an actor's lip:
my perch and cackle cauldron eyes
grow to zeroes at the bed-end of this,
the only stage & staging of my play.

The plot unknotted shows that
money's short and friends are few,
the body betraying itself busily:
an absurd third act.

The audience talks over my lines,
ignoring the tree tops exploding,
the neighbors *******, the heavens
& the hells standing empty.

Yet they hush when the curtain rises
on mosquitos haunting a Brazilian cafe
dotted in cochineal - Aperol spritzes
scatter along a failing, darkling rail.

We can't pick our audience;
neither can we deny that they
can only do their best within their needs,
nothing else or more,

& midnight confessions, truest
& heart-rent soliloquies, are nothing now
but furtive scrawls across a torn ticket,
swept up when the house lights come on.