The lamp is lit, the day undercover.
I wonder where you are?  In my chair,
in my room, on the sidewalk.  I think
I will never see you.  Your face
in the lamplight mirrors the summer
night I called but you never came.

I sit under the light of the lamp
I ponder on my hands.  I held
you beyond understanding.

I promised not to hurt you.
I failed.  I heard myself
cry on the beach we shared
once and briefly.

My eyes are closing. The
light has long ago gone out.

Caroline Shank

I write so you will answer me.
I see you sit, your confusion
curled like hair on a new poodle.

I write to touch your face with
my thoughts.  Know that my
fingers wrap around your sorrows.

I offer my hand in reply to
your silence.  I wait for

you
to touch

me.

Here I am.  I write words
in the wind

which brushes

by you.


Caroline Shank

Do people take car rides
anymore?  Is the cost too
high?

We would spend Sunday's
in the car exploring the
streets and lanes, farms
and small lakes or streams
around northern Indiana.

The weather was always
a wash of sunlight on barns,
small grassy paths, cows
and chickens lowing and
crowing.  

We would stop for a minute,
kiss as if we belonged to the
shade from the trees and
chatter of the singular little
brooks outside the car.

It was always gentle on
Sunday.  The car seemed
to know where to go. I
would slide across the front
seat and with my head on
his shoulder sigh, forgetting
the hundred pages of
Shakespeare that waited
patiently to keep me up

late into the night, the verbs
to conjugate for Monday.
They could wait. I remember
I loved to inhale the music
of the spring.  

A symphony
played as we rolled down
the windows of our pleasure.

Caroline Shank

Storied history.  Water the
color of your eyes.  The
various blues and greens,
the browns are all reflected

in my soul.

You stand in the cold
shallows . I saw you there
a long time ago, freezing
knees and lips.

I had to kiss you so long
on the blanket we wrapped
along your lanky body.

Lake Michigan.  You called
it my bathtub because I was
so eager to get there every
summer.  

Fossils like smiley faces
washed up into my net.
You helped me collect
them along the brown
shore sharp with the

memory of thousands of
years of brilliance,
Of radiant Joy when
the birds arrived, when
the glacier morained
and you and I fell
in love

on the shoreline of
a great adventure.

Caroline Shank

I want a new literature, something
closer, before the white froth of
language spreads itself on the
sand.  A new book to read, a
clean beach over the world of
my youth.  My mother burrows in
shallow ground, is a bird pecking
its way out.  She drapes herself
in feathers.

I need a new literature.  Something
to hold above the wound where she
rips in and out of me like a
door. A new book to lay over an
old story.

I sift through the silt of this
shore where my world is
dug up with tin spoons.  I grow
old in the quiet of my age,
hear the sound of freedom, see
the last tears run into the
ocean of my regrets.


Caroline Shank

My children were the mothers of my soul.
Each of them took me to places I had
never been.

When they were babies I learned
through trials the fears that croup
doesn't **** a 3 month old,
that my daughter wore Holly Hobby
and never told me she hated it.

I learned the Sears catalogue by
heart and always bought the 3 pack
of whatever they had on sale.
They never complained.

I was amazed that my daughter
spent her only 50.cents on an
owl for my collection.  Ruby lives
with me today.

They were mine until they
started school.  Then they
we're feral.  

My stretch marks crawl across me
like fuscia rivulets.  I have
left the itch of them behind.

I am a grandmother to strangers.
A mother to voles.  I bred
them out like songs I can no longer

hear.

Caroline Shank

Five powerful privet hedges formed
a fence in our front yard in New York.
My mother planted them for some
reason, known only to her.

The branches grew sparse and suffered.
Failure to thrive.  Knee high to my
twelve year old body, it never bloomed
in that yard of green weeds and dandelions.

It was meant to keep the
dogs away.  We had feral cats
in the yard.  My brother and I
were feral.  My mother bred us
into the wind of 1940's Chicago.

So that was that for her.  She
retreated into madness from
Chicago to New York to
South Bend.

Fences, like my mother's
addictions, are not always seen.
They crawl up your leg like
flakes of hate.  They keep growing
until your eyes are holes in the
twigs.

A fence so thick you think
only prayers will let you out.
Easter Sunday blooms in
the trailers and filaments.

No relief.  They scratch
on your so small soul.  White
privet petals crawl into crevice
and crease.  

I no longer itch but
tic with the rhythm
of the seasons.


Caroline Shank

Look, I am shook from my
shallows, ten thousand leagues
deep – my heartbeats were war-
ships; you drowned the whole
fleet, but I'll hold on to hope like
sand holds on to heat that for all of
my troubles, you could love me, at least.