You're Doing it Again


You're doing it again,
that habit of pulling me over, the
kiss behind my ear where you.know
I will never tell. I watch you
as you try to lift me.

Uunwritten and unsung the sound
of your one hand clapping, my nod
that tells you to fire the cannons.
I am deaf now. I watch as
your familiar hand reaches away
for the face you tried to draw
so many times.

More than that it's the daylight's
fading fingers at my throat.
I whisper a melody you recognize.  
Tomorrow walks in on time every
morning and I wait to see if you
are willing with me or if your stroke
on my face will be the last mewling
at the edge of a lie.

Caroline Shank
April 28, 2022

Okay Country green and faire,
the rival feathers of America,
the soft shells of Siesta Key
Beach, the roar of the freight
train as it turned belly up in
the anxiety of a post qualude
weekend.

Marriage was the script of
the Land and grass the dress
the smaller stately Maples
wore spitefully as the red and
black Muscovy waddled up

looking for the crisps of bread
that Jim threw out every day.
The gospels of Sand Hills
displayed in the Red hills
colors.

The citizens of the Back Yard
smoked the tender joint while
I ran to the top of the hill, Jean.
The score my devastation wrote
on the billious worn sofa.  Green
toile soldiers armed with the
nets of armaments.

Toile was the pattern of my
tru loves coat.  Green were the
dresses flirtatiously spilling my
*******.

Then you lay my sorry self on the
deck of the ship Wisconsin.
My chair was missing and
we made clumsy love in
spite of the sway of the
floorboards.

Oh feature with me,
man of sorrows, to
the end of the play.
I will dance at the middle
and musk the top of my old
bear.

Bare my top and I will,
saucy,
be the selfsame

sinner after all.


Caroline Shank

HI Sam. It's nice of you to
stop by the carousel.  I was
looking for a place to stand.
My hands are blistered,
and I am covered with the
salt of ancient tears.

You are welcome to taste
a slice of yesterday.

My poems are stones to throw
Into the lake of imagination.
You ask, from my lips, a song, which
I cannot fathom.

My writings are my culminations.
The detritus of my lover's stories.
I write for them, the sea grasses of
which I am composed.

Don't take away the tangles.

I write for you to stay in the
grass castle. I apologize for
the rumpled beds and bare
promises.

I am scarred by my lover's
last goodbye's.

But Sam, I am

happy

to see

you.




Caroline Shank
7.31.2022

I want to travel with you
in Summer or a Winter along
the pavements
thick with the sounds of
falling feet, trampled dreams,.
The detritus of lives lived by
the thin soled.

I offer you old hands to hold,
Wishes warmed by heat.
The loved fingers that will
undo you In the theater of
your imagination.

We will talk of things imagined.
Our stories flung into the gas
fire of old age. We will go
places only books invite us
into, brush skin of
our fine lines.

We hold
onto the strings of time

for

as long as

galaxies of desire

rock us.


Caroline Shank
6.22.2023

They won't come back to me,
The dreams.
Fine lines of memory.

I dreamt of you recently.  I
kissed you,  I don't know
where we were but the taste of
you mouth took me
away to the beach of
winds.  The
warm sand.
Soft summer skin.

I lay over sleep  like
a coat
I hide in memories.

Return to me.
The night stretches
and reaches
for you.

I wait again, me,
holding onto the ashes of
love.  


The
night elongates,
that song.
We danced.

I dream of you and the
past lives again. Lights
silver me.  For the time you
hold me I SURRENDER.

Softly.
I walk in your footsteps..

Still.

The detritus of sleep  

remain scattered.

Caroline Shank
November 29 2021yy





They won't come back to me,
The dreams. They curl.
Fine lines of memory.

I dreamt of you recently.  I
kissed you,  I don't know
where we were but the taste of
your flavored mouth took me
away to the beach of
winds and seagulls.  The
warm sand. Your
soft summer skin.

I lay over sleep  like
a coat
I hide in memories.

Return to me.
The night stretches
and reaches
for you.

I wait again, me,
holding onto the ashes of
love.  Burnt.

The reels of
night elongate,
That song.
We danced.

I dream of you and the
past lives again. Bright lights
silver me.  For the time you
hold me I surrender utterly.

Yellow burns. Softly.
I walk in your footsteps..

Still.

The detritus of sleep  

remain scattered.


Caroline Shank




…

Are you sleeping up there in
the stone parapet in which
you spend your time writting
letters and showing how you
can trip the light fantastic

with no one watching. You,
where you retreat to listen
to music. To read your books
and with wine dream,
like Miniver Cheevy, of the
days of roses.

Do you think of me? My
perfume you were so fond
of.  Oh, how I adored you!

I am not allowed to climb
the steps to your so private
sanctuary.  The locked door
reminds me of your pledge
to God to leave me and the
child.  

We are not yours, not anymore.
You with your hunched shoulders
crying "That is not all, that is
not it at all."

Your dead heroes replace me.
I should have gone away before
I knew you loved me.  But how
could I?  I will tomorrow shows
me a new place to hide away

Think of me when you are
inside with your plans and dreams.,
and I am on the outside scrolling
across the long years in which
I am stranded

in.


Caroline Shank

To be truthful my life has
been a waste of space. I
have contributed no thing of
value. Not beauty, or trust.

I have shared treasured
moments with friends and
family, all gone to ashes
everyone.  I have struggled
with the toxicity of this ephemeral life and poisoned
myself.  

When I die the clouds above
me will flee to warmer climes
where I was happy once.

Caroline Shank

The voice, the bell-yellow
voice plays on.
Under the mind like a layer
of canvas lie the brushes
and strokes, the arms and legs
of memory.  The arrival on the
skin of sound is the moment
of love.  The unfurling of
the pallette.

You say, listen, the wail of
breath on brass is mine.  No,
it is yours.  The voice, no
longer alone, even when
unaccompanied, falls from
the blues of evenings or the
reds of afternoons, approaches
with footprints in sand.  We
are castled in music, our
colors unfurled.

Our fingers on the keys.  We
see the archetype of design in
the sound
the movement in the fabric of
stripes.  The sound’s colors
draw us to each other.
Listen.  The wail of breath
on brass is everywhere.
Listen.


Caroline Shank
Revised 3 28 2023

The wind is cold, the night is long.
I never sleep.  You are gone.
Swirls of pain
surround me and I leave my
body behind.

I cling to the fastness of thought,
somersault through millennia
to witness you through the
blinkless eye of light.

Time is an illusion.  We met
in the unformed moment of
creation, chased each other
around the universe.  A
cosmology of wonder.

Now, at the last,  
moments of my life
collapse down  
death like ivy on
winter bricks.

Caroline Shank

Can anyone help me? Is
there a minute particle of
a sympathetic soul in the
residue of a life loudly
lived?

I don't really have a
syllable of rain to tell
of the need of personal
experience.

Someone run to me with
an outstretched hand
that I may not flail
in the cold.

God knows of my need
and He cries at your
indifference.

Go away from me, I will
struggle to keep from
showing you my unrequited
solitude.

I am called The City of
New Orleans.



Caroline Shank

I have seen the moments of my
lifetime flicker and I was afraid.
I have won at love. My hair fell
long on your shoulders and I
laughed to see such a sport.

I have seen rhe souls of loved
ones shivver but I was young
then. I did not know your
Pain. I never knew you in your
lighter days. My heart pumped and
yet I sang then in my ununderstanding.
You were plaid in your dimensions
and red were the heartbeats
of our shared misunderstanding.

My feet then, a true size 8, were
made for dancing. I stepped softly
on your shoes and we were sway
and music.  The night's of our
repeatable dance's reps. Holy
in the church of our souls.

You didn't die then though I wish
you had. A million little deaths
over the years of sadness.

You were erased on a Sunday
morning
by the ink of yesterday's

Betrayal

Caroline Shank
April 17.2022

My Windows look out on the Hastas.
mMy plastic flamingos travelled
     back here.
     Here from Florida

My bolus of early spring
     flowers offer pollin
but no bees arrive.  The
Blossoms reach out to
     the sky.  

It is to no avail.
My hands
shake in anticipation.

The cup of leaves with bite
     holes sift the want
     from my poetry.

I am an adventure.
     Tomorrow I will write
about you. How youth
escaped me and how
the open dreams danced

a little jig, a show of knee

And

The

Last time

ever
    
     you

        called

My

     name.


    
Caroline Shank
6.16.2024

Tomorrow is the day my poem
is about you.  It's never today that
turns my heart to the rhythm
of the Gulf's.  
curved
shore. The dial always  tuned to
the meridian… south,.

Tomorrow I will write my poem
where I belong,
with you and long beaches,
canvas chairs and white gulls
screaming above our
heads along the shore.

Tomorrow, poetry will be
written and love consummated…

I write you anyway
Sammy,  Today,
Gray under shells
on a white
sand beach.
My *******
leak.

This poem
can't wait.


Caroline Shank
3.24.22

All my trials Lord
soon will be
stumbling,

Hopscotch
Red rover

come over

Do you wanna
dance

Aphrodite?

It's a long song,
story

Day O

Trial me O Lord
With Your

Love.

Sans punishment
Sans forgiveness

Secular seculorem

Amen.


Caroline Shank
9.5.2024





¹

Where In the crates of

song

notes and of

lyrics

Is the one, the singular
The Q of Stephen

to find among the

Beer bars.

Release Me

The song lay
unyellowed.

Then the growl

A finger width away.

But it was the

jazz then, the windows
thrown open

And you left

your song

without

pity.



Caroline Shank
3.10.2024

Sometimes I see you dancing.
Your arms are strong and hold
me up.  I would have
fallen without you, tumbled down
like a doll flung away.

Sometimes I see your strong
walk. You were my bear in the
warm summer of my 27th year.

You are still playing
music in my old age.

Sometimes I see you
dancing
in the night,
in the rain.

Our
song,

floats away

like smoke

in the air that

I breathe.




Caroline Shank

The rippling of the sand in a shoreline
pool is the shallow response to the

waves.

The sunshine's answer is to the dark.
Tomorrow always unfolds in the
prism of today.

Love unrequited lies on the heart like
tears on the page
Shiny shells

     Lie. Your hands
hold your face and
Wait.

You will find the
   Shift of my love

Onto

   Your beautiful

timeless moment.

Context will show you

The Way to my

      heart.


Caroline Shank
10.22.23

I used my last chance, a ride
on the solar system of emotions.
I fell off and sat for a minute
on the eyelash of memory.

The long rope of my only
last and forever temptation
unkind and undone.

It's not true.  It takes a minute
to unravel the sinue wrapped
around the idea of you.
Wrought around the music

is you struggling forever,
trying to unravel the speed
of memory.

The seed of yesterday,  The
bed of undoing.  Red and
ripped I cling to the
final appointment.

Tomorrow is the kaleidoscope
you feared. The colors
patterns solidify and the habits
reveal the dead solid center.

I surround myself with the
sunflower blanket. The
synapse of yesterday tugged

before I knew you.

and dragged
the moon's light mine.


Caroline Shank

Tomorrow

There is no forever for me
The pulse of death stopped
and I am limping, I am
stammering.   You took
forever from my catalog.

Tomorrow issues from out of
a cauldron.  There are no voices
in the wilderness.  St Paul
come to me. I am short of
goodness and love.

Teach me oh Lord to skip
stones across the Jordan.
I will drink tea in a mug with
your name on it.

Brown is the color of my true
love's hair.  My white hair
shapes the Ganges on
your chest.  I told you I

would write.

Tomorrow's fortunes feature
you in some farther

field.

I awake from this deep dream
of sleep Abou

Where there is no wind, for
tomorrow never ever

comes.

Forever and ever
(Saecula saeculorem.)


Caroline Shank

I am sick in my self.
My fingers curl
around the stylus I keep with me
at all times.

A small black plastic taper with
which I tap out pieces of my
unwholesome history.  Do you
remember when I loved you?

The green moss grew only
on the north.  My sorry
adventures were always
South.  I mean to mention,

last of my breaths that I
have been sick in the
clever ways my sorry aim

took you to my lair.  I fed
the worm of imagination
with the cookies of my soul.

You are delicious and I
wore my plight in full
view.  You called me.
I replied in tattered
sentiments.

The rotation of the earth
holds me forever South.
I can never heal the disease
of attraction.

I will love forever the sounds
of love no matter who,
no matter why.

You are a beast of my jungle.
I wear your skin like camouflage.

I bivouac where you are and
leave at night, no note, no
whisper of sorrow.


Caroline Shank
8.30.2022

Your father will be gone soon.
You will not mourn him until
Rachel refuses your own sorrowing
self.  Time like a water hose
with a short faucet will trick you
into thinking the end is not near.

It's me that needs you.
It is a lonely walk along
long grass.  You played soldiers
on the lawn of your father's gone
to seed everyone trod the clover
and yellow flowers watching you.

You will find the crossroads
to meet again if you leave him now.
His breathing is stress to you, his
failure like chains on a door
.
Take your time
while it still gives off a
fragrance
to memory that
is disbelief.

Go, take your cloak.
I tremble at your nativity.


I am an old woman who
believes in God and
not much else.  
You have turned
pride inside
to rest and think of
tomorrow.  Will you
be still be loved then

My son?

Caroline Shank
2.14.22

I am the Audience.  I write
to hear what I have to say.
This jumble of verbs and
adjectives, this conglomeration
of images is my body.

These warts and crevices, the pocks
of my life roll up into
words.  I copy them in the winter
and I write with them in the
long summer mornings.

But you, you predate my vocabulary.
And I say to myself you Are.  I
make you from the letters of
experience.

How else to tell the world, and
I must tell the world, that I exist,
that you live.  You are the noun.
I write to keep myself formed
into the story we made.  You
are the Subject of this
safari through my bones and I
am the Author.

My pen spills, a diary of tight
lighting firing through the
ink.  I write to say you
exist.

I scribe this plot thralled
Gothic romance.  
The story is always the same.

You, you are alive somewhere
in the world of words
I create.

And I,
I am your god now.


Caroline Shank

Hey Alabama. I drove through
you half my life ago. You were
most green and gracious. Blue
skies foamed clouds supine on
my skin. A thin veil of fog an
unseen future away.

I slowly crossed your planet,
picked flowers on the verge.
I remember the heat. The red
hair of summer curled against
the day. Nights vibrated, a gong
gone mild. Soft, resonating, still
resonating. I breathed air in
like smoke, holding it inside
for long seconds, a question
waiting for its answer.

Long years have veined miles,
mapped time. I am blued with
thinking of it.

Hey Alabama.
I remember. Your highways
still, so sweet. You travel
soft as sleep.


June 11, 2000 rc

When men love they move slower
than dawn rolls onto day. Arms
turn toward each other as if to
grasp their beloved as raindrops
grasp the stalk of a flower,
melting around tender shoots
like silk wrapping. They whose
feet have always left sound
behind them, their prints
evaporate in whispers.

Men gather in bundles the
persons they have been, select
the best, the finest moments,
to plant by the porch of the
adored. They go through the
weather of their passion focused,
translated into a language as
sharp, as clear, as cries in
blue sea-gulled air when
nothing but nothing stands
between nature and desire.
The goal of movement is charged
across a world lost to all
desire for choice.

Men love with a kinetic so deep,
so intimate, it is movement inscribed
on every breath.

If then the moment should
come of the crack in the bell of
the heart, when daylight rips
the landscape, they fall, as a
rock falls, to crash along a
beach utterly void of life, to
become trilobite in noiseless
water, moved by the purposeless
shift of time and stone.

Caroline Shank


(This is the best I could glean about men in love. Being female may not have helped.)

Our Song


Narcissist that I am the
last quarter of my life is

filled
with you.

The dark
is my friend.

Old age
recapitulates
loneliness.
Life
is
slow dance .

I digress

Wrinkles and craters
belong to the
years of
oil and cigarettes.

I never knew you were
on the way.

Now time's ******* o
surfaces

The seaglass fractures
light
in the Son

There is a destiny
unclasped in the

Light.

You lead  me
in this

our

Song


Caroline Shank
9.17.2024


For Jack
9.17.2024
Song.

One tear leaves, shiny vestige
of the brains transcription.
A movie house of dying
images scribes in cunieform
as I watch thru my prism
of memory

The racks of yesterdays
like layers of summer boats
in winter

of the claws of
sorrow,

the yank

of tears

Birth the ends of
sorrow when love

again

Walked

in..

You stood there
reflecting
my broken
healing, a

Refrain of

Saxaphone s.
Of love

In the

Tear s.

You Blessed me
from  your
so far

away.



Caroline Shank
5.20.24

I am the next wind
which crosses your neck.
The raindrop on your cheek.
When you wake up
tomorrow I will be the
crease on your face, the
tangle of your blanket.

Know this then, I will
never leave you.  The
scent of me lines your
breath.  

So now I lay me down
to sleep. I pray my soul is
yours to keep


Alt ending

So now I lay me down
to sleep.  I know your soul
is mine to keep.

Amen


Caroline Shank

I am an Elderly woman fit
Only for the company of fine
women and the occassional
fake Mimosa.  My hair is
white, the before longed for
auburn is past.  Bottles in
a old shelf

Today is the dreamed of
moment lived like a zoo
animal in the back cage.

I will eat cereal from a cake
cone thrown to me by those
without the wrinkles of my
experience.

Not given the dignity of a
place in the sun. My youth
mispent. I spend my time
cleaning which my dead
husband thought amusing.

I only smile when I think
Tomorrow will come to

Everyone.

Soon.


Caroline Shank
12.23.2023

Midnight slouches to
A Manger in a cold straw
barn where He is born.

Caroline Shank

.C.'Blue is not my favorite
color.

Circles of sapphire
worn by /
11/lonely

women

Whose husband's memory
Failed with
yesterday's
sports scores.

Break my heart  with temptation.


I will love you no matter
what .


Caroline Shank
March 2. 2025

This is the doctor's waiting room.  
Can you smell the antiseptic mixed
with the cigarettes everyone
smoked when I was a young girl.

The office had a funky smell.
There were lots of magazines and
always the Reader's Digest.
Sometimes I sit alone in the
pine paneled room, waiting..
My mother was never there.
Daddy tried to cope with all the
collosal wastes of time.
He worked hard
in the city. You know about my
mother already.  And the Dr.

The Dr was the only adult who
listened to me for much of my
Youth, it seems to me.
That was because of the Dr. Jane
novels I read over and over.

This catechism of lies
satisfied me. No not the Baltimore.
I know you thought of that
first thing.  This teaching taught
me to not say no to drunken

boys.  It told me this festering
resentment that took hold
of me then was never
a dream.  The poems of
romance and the failure that tried to
drip down my life sap into soil.

This Frustration
always was Magnified by
the mixture of gin and
the lost virginity at 15 to
a backseat ****.

The years have shown the lies
little girls chatechyse.  Except when
I had pneumonia.  

Later he said I was still too
ugly to go to school.  So I went
into the maw of my sixteenth
year.  I cinched my waist of
failures to my secret self.

Then I found out he was wrong.
Somewhat wrong.   I finished
with life at this point and waited for
you to reinstate the proscenium. That
was how I saw it.  Remember
how I cried when they played "the
Lion Sleeps Tonight?   It is the
song of decimation, of the Nihilism
you don't like me arguing with you
all the time.

My life is a tale you don't have
listen to. Careless, incipient,
amniotic dreams of an old
woman you just made love to.



Caroline Shank
2.17.22

It is the ragged ends of tonight
that my pen hovers over lhe
linen pre drawn the colored
lines. Oh tout le monde.

The heavy scent of patchouli
after all the years….
Folded bell bottoms in
flowers splash and i

bend at the waist.
******* fall cold touch
the air that I breathe
swept my wait against

You as the scramble

began.


Caroline Shank
10.18.2023

Old Roses and Summers


My life, then, hung like a
sun-yellow mobile that spun
in the heat as I flowed from
one end of summer to the other.
The songs on the radio were
my island.  My life as a girl
in the years before fences
appears in memory slides,oses
dressed in the beaches of my
youth.

I grew from seeds to roses in
the ground of my childhood
summers.  In the calendar of
my life as a young girl
every date prefigured you.
Day by day, in the years of
growing I bought, with the
barter of my soul, all the
heat and all the music.

Battened by the times before
you, strengthened by long
storms, hot suns, cold winds,
this, then is what I offer
you:  deep beaches, thornworn
roses, summers that flow
from one end of your life
to the other.


102592

I lack everything
I have no essence to cherish
I am dense to myself
Fear prowels my thoughts

The Divinity in me
Waits for no one
I am unblessed
Repulsed by nature
Coward
Today

I will return to my Recovery
Lessons learned

The deadend is not
signed
It is a curve that
ends on the
Last Exit to Chicago.

Caroline Shank
May 1. 2024

Sacrament


Speak to me or don't.  I have heard
your words before.  In silence or in
laughter, suburban sunny spaces
or the city's hidden doorways

with a rush of air
on ******* uncovered
in the rush,
graced only by the statues
purple shadows.

The cautious heaving
from below tells you to be
ready.

Reach for my deepest shadow's
source, mine in me
the whispers of my throat's
taught moan.

Find the sun in my
embrace and in the
strength of my desire
only will we

have  drunk

the sacrament ,

.

Caroline Shank
2.22.22
No

I don't think you know about
the stain above the line of my
sight.  The colors that keep changing with each breathing,
the syllables that won't stay still.

There is a blot on my brain
that smears thoughts into a
puddle.  Did you ever see
yellow reach out like a
tentacle?  It grabs whatever
it can find.  Red is next, a
little less demanding but
still impenetrable.  

It's the blue that can ****.
Uncontained it flows over
my mind like a silent wave.

I can't show you because
I don't know the magic
phrase that makes the
inkblot go away.

Is it in the rainbow when God
said we are alone now?  I
flay in the flow of the thought
that we got on the boat in
the first place.

You cannot see what I hide,
from even myself.  You may
hold me, and if you can, find
the color of safety.

Caroline Shank

Recruit

She slept briefly, the reach,
too long now, gone.
Too many sloe gins.

Fifteen.

Brought  the
inevitable.  New York
was never a lesson

learned.

You were not born

yet.

Her poetry in her belly.
Rumpled beds. Blanket
on the backseat.

A no adult zone.

To remember Is to lose.

Again.

The rustle of the
rubber
tree.  Cat calls,
loud farts.

More, pulled out guns.

The bulge was
caused by a
magazine.

She, on the floor
of the aforementioned
seat of springs, could

not stop the
whack of boys

whose underwear
was washed by
a mother of

some, as yet
unknown,

red handed chapped
and oh so tired

Former

Recruit



Caroline Shank
9.1.2024

What I’ve Learned

Today, the mind meld is
spewing the kava of
my thoughts over
this place where I live.

Metaphorically.

I”veI learned

That I am egotistical.
That my vocabulary
   is DIFFICULT.

The years of myself.
The coffee, and the
   conversation,
   reading.

The dialectics, like coffee
and cigarettes, the years
over writing, revisions.
Books, sometimes 2 a day.
The Great Gatsby in an
afternoon

I Was not unusual.

There are more things
in Heaven and Earth
Horatio...

But I digress.

Southern Days


I almost called you the other day
to remind you I have a birthday
soon and yours is near too.   I
knew you'd be busy and I put
aside my knitting to think about you.

Last year was the trip to Savannah.
I showed you pictures.  Jim died
before we could go back.  I wanted
to include you in my reminiscences.

Tomorrow it is supposed to rain.
I don't do anything on rainy days.
I sit by the window with my tea.
Remember I told you about my
cat. She stays close when she
senses I am looking for you.

I know Jim said you would come
when the sky was gray and I was
lost.  He thought I was lost a lot.
He would ask and there was
never a reply.  He was not waiting
to hear me.

He didn't know that the days of
a fine drizzle were my favorite
days. I watch to see if you are
walking toward me. Your tan, hands

Beautify.. My life with your strong
fingers. Your red hair ubiquity
of the love you left me when
I said no to you Un covered
you said goodbye and then
I died.

The cat knows and she kneads
my shirt.  I stroke her and
call your southern name out
Loud to the mirror of remembering.



Caroline Shank
June 19, 2022


Caroline Shank

I am enough. I am bigger

Than 10 pounds. Enough.
That old saw.
I cannot pass for Shirley
Temple

But I am responsible for my
happiness Tom.
I danced at the graves of

Voodoo priests.  

In my imagination I was
lauded by Great Spirits.

I am enough to fly between
the Holy Days, the

Vatican of my mind is
open and I ply the

pages of my long life
from my fingers.

Caroline Shank
I.27.2024

Realization begins with a grassy
patch on the cheeks.  A loosening
chin.  Our eyes tear
a little in the woven years.
We get older, better.  We stop
weeding.  Time is represented
by the passage of linear
rows.  Memory, imagination and
the strings of movement flare.
Answers streak the imagination's
runways.  We used to be whatever we
were in those early youthful afternoons.
Now the flowers are loose and confident.
We plow the past in conversation.

Look at us.  Our age signs
the geography.  We rise from
a packed landscape, determine
the motion of the earth.  The
winds of the last forty years
blow from behind.

We form together.  
Clouds gather us in.
We raise flags.
Our answers are on the
breezes of the past.

We sing.
Our anthem is
a song
for the ages.


Caroline Shank

I want you to know things

I never had the strength

to tell you.  I am reminded of 

Zues, of the wisdom of 

Socrates, the guts of 

Anthony.


No, I have the soul of 

a chorister.  Back and forth,

strophe and antistrophe.

I wear the mask made

by decisions and revisions

that a minute

would reverse.


I repeat  to

myself the lines from

Eliot.  They give me 

fortitude to say the

unsayable.  You are

more wonderful than

a day at the warm,

sunred beach.


You tell me how you feel

and I dare to disbelieve

you.  I am upended

by the impossibility.

My throat is a naked 

slash.  My mind is

a tan tunnel.

I implode


at the possibility that

you are truly speaking.

That you measure me

by your kindness.


I will go first before

you realize that I am

the way the world ends.


I am a whimper in the room.

To you belongs my

hollow flesh.


I tear myself in half.

I begin the way up.

Charon sends me

to you whom the 

gods have released.



Caroline Shank

Why Should I

Love in you your crumbs,
the
humor,

the drip of tears from your
moist eyes.

The retro lip with which you
Spew your vision amongst
      pearls.

The climb to you began
early in the morning,

wrapped around and
  Called me

out loud.

You were Jesus
to my
mutiny.  A Promise to
carry me on wings.

There is no ******* Garden.
The reference
only works on those who
are too drunk

to stand up.

In your day I partied
beneath the walls

of Gethsamane.

I wore leaves and
saw

your name

Victorious.


Caroline Shank
10.21.23

You were young, on the
cliff of summer. Amazing stirring
possibilities.  Running in
the rain.  Stars hid.
Crepuscular love on
the brink of light.

Wet and loud you toked
a joint without me.  You
footed the soil.  Your
name became reckless.

Young is not the only way
your wet strings tore at
you. Screams from the
doorway dove into the
beds of dead flowers.

Many years spinning and
the muddy leftovers of
yesterday toe the mind,
eclipsing memory.

It is waiting that brought
you to this place.  Your
red hair under the
Summer sky shone.

The years after the caul
lie on your thoughts, reluctant
to uncover nascent
feelings.

You inhale.

I write to bring home the
surreal sun on the skin
of time. Before

you left
me.

Caroline Shank
12.5.22

You asked me if I had
     Written
a poem today?

No I said.  You could not
have known that you are

     my poem.

My metaphors have changed.
You took my sad attempt’
'
to make of my life

     a story someone might
read, even for a moment.
Tonight I can tell you

     You are the meter
which steers the thing
I call love.

An unusual poem, filled
with all the things you are.

So I will know you when
     finally
we are met
and One.  

Caroline Shank
December 17. 2024

For Kinik

Tonight is soft, the Wisconsin
winter's chill is tame and I am
practicing for queen of today.

I am lit inside.  Determined,
I breathe.  My familiar scorn
is put away. I walk the city's
street remembering, the
calming soft breathing.

Tonight is almost over and i
approach tomorrow in silence.
I walk some more in the

chilly drizzle. So soft the shadows
smile back from the store windows.
There are no don't walk signals.

The neon sign in Maxwell's flags
me, lures me inside.
I walk on.  I want to reach the
seventh block.  It's a good
number.  I stop at the gate,
a small park.  I pass it by.

My serenity is a soul sculpture.
No longer a passage in some
one's book. I author me.

Thanks to the moments of
shared caring.

I walk on enthrall of the soft
winds that bring me home.

I am returning to MySelf.

Caroline Shank
1.17.2023

Imaginings

Midsummer.

My thoughts are
charged by
familiar memories.

It's been almost 50 years.
You and the heat
and the music.  A joint
between us and the
puppy running around.

I believed in you.
We danced in the
room above the bar.  
Mrs. Jones. The wick lit.
Tomorrow was a day
away.  

The blue smells of smoke.  
The beach.  The soft sand.
The striped umbrella.
Our music played for
a thousand nights.

Jeans and leather.
Together.

*

I prayed for hours.
In my chair, in the
sunlight.

"Love him my love" I repeated
for so long that July Sunday.

We belonged to a rift in time.
I excavated in the sand and found
you.

We were young then. The
sound of your bike is in
my sleep.

I never knew
it could hurt
so much.

You never waved

goodbye.




Caroline Shank
June 15, 2022

I never expected this.  That
in my 70's I would be ink
on a blank page. That my
life's work would be poems
on a shelf, written about
gone people, dead memories.

I never wanted them, the memories, the reflections
stored in old coffee cans.
Waterlogged letters saved
from decay to become themselves decayed.

I will sit forever in my chair,
me and my notebooks fallen
around me, incense laden,
curled around my slippered
feet, hiding the poems pressed
in the pages of my youth.

Caroline Shank

Recumbent in my brown

velour reclining chair I

dream of Ireland.  Never

having been there at all.


My path through the green

hills of my father's family

county winds to the shingle

and thatch pub.  I meet

Kieran where there is

dancing and beer-o. 

Bagpipes and kilts.


In my reverie, 

I top off warm Guinness,

and tumble to the blarney. 

of the sweet, moving, man who

slides toward me with

Irish blue eyes. 


I cry out

the sounds

of a lost, lonely, song.


I wake in my chair,

a long way 


from home.



Caroline Shank

The yard.
The wide green yard.  
The rooster lifts his
trumpet to the Lord.  

There is the song
he practiced for the
sermon.  The choir off the
fence.  The Duck plashed
and the piggie counted
down.

The Serenade, his song
of Songs.  

The chicks wait
as they
we're told to do.

Billy's coming home.

The wooden fence is
cleaned.  
His flag draped.

The song
ready.

Billy fell in the ditch of
Unknowing.  

His war
over.  

The Rooster cries,

Taps.


Caroline Shank