With aphids and cherubs barking up the wrong tree
A November with rain on its mind
clicks a heel in the underbrush, where all things creep
in the ether floss of our lost tendrils of Time
emergent in luminous twine
every stitch, a rivet in a concrete swamp.
tethering a plight.

II

Christmas lights lockjaw hamlets with crepe frost
glistening earthbound color wheels in the jagged blanket
of a crisp 3 AM. a covert Decembering as such a night
is want to do.

then the gray weeps
as window panes
tell you
Why?

does a woman not know
how she looks
when she smiles
and I don't know
my name

I write in runes.  I mean to
leap the alphabet.  The orbital
spin of time and me dizzy and all. .

I will write you tomorrow,
shake the mica off my
thoughts.  You will not
walk with me among the
glacial shores of thinking.

I will return a fossil of
millions of years,
along the edges
of meaning.  I am not
unfamiliar with your pace
along the beach where i
lie so still.  It's why I will
write tomorrow when my
heart has ******

in the sun.  

I don't see you
coming anymore to the sandhills of
Poems.  It was always
difficult to reach you through
the tangle of my sclerotic

heart.

Tomorrow I will be a fragment of
loving you.  I will hold the
thought until it fossil
freezes and I will lie on the
Beach of Remembering,
washed by eons of

poetry.  I will write you
but all you will hear are the

echoes
of forgetting.


Caroline Shank

Scrambling, I assure you,
from a distance
try get over those commas
will ya
I can't find the ****
to whatever this distance

is

and am ambivalent maybe
or not about what not
and
well
you

can this be crossed
is this my shell
clamming up
footing off

snick snick
something is
advancing
subterranean
stranger
I know

This spindly outreach
trembling for connection
bleeding all the hope
of every lyricist
I really don't know
if I have anything else
than this sing along
than this wring along

Get the angle right,
and the light from a wan blue sky
reflects on the sodden ground
like a disco dancefloor,
pathfinding to somewhere
with umbrellas in glasses,
sand between toes
and baked skin

That it is February
in this upper latitude
can do one for a minute,
let us lounge, sweat loose
and remember our grins