Neitzche said we are doomed

to live each life over and over

again exactly the same way.


I differ.  Our lives of flowers

and yes, of nails and pain

will live once in the pocket

of the Universe unshed of

all memory.


Tomorrow is not predictable.

We shovel today's minutes into

the jeans and skirts, the

pockets of yesterday.


We are trialing this day and

have not yet decided 

what to tell, and what to bury

under the rocks, the shales, 

of memory.


We will not recur 

but we will live on

together

forever.



Caroline Shank

It's a rainy day in the usual
cool of Wisconsin in the
dark months.  
There are  hundreds of shades of
gray and dun.

I am wide awake and missing
the sunlight of better times
when my soul prospered.
The sweet taste of warm on my
face.  You on my mind and
long walks.  I have grayed out
the summer
days when
you were the only thing on
my landscape.

Winter has turned all my
thoughts to long shadows
of memory.  You were never
gray or dun colored.  You
are inside me in colors of
radical brilliance.

Tomorrow I will assign the
sorrow.  Today the fragility
of missing you is like fine
single panes of memory I
cannot shatter.

On most days you lay
quietly in the soft room
of yesterday.
Today you are restless.
I shake myself awake but
the dream insists.

I'm old to myself while you
remain young in the roundness
of a single summer.  The fabric
of warm on my nascent love
has pins and sticks me.

Don't walk in.  I am
not available.  My hair is no
longer the color of amber,
My tan limbs are startling
In their denial of tan.

I think of you throughout
poetry. The long lines
of unmetered days return
but I get on.

Mistake me not for ignorance.
The vocabulary of my life
begins and ends in
four
short
months.

Caroline Shank

There is no need to
read

here of a wasted life. The
Days slide now into the

abyss.  

Neitxche saw the walls
close in a
drugged
relevation.

I cant scream his name

Or any other.

The echo has landed
And
I am strapped to here

forever.

Oh my God I survive
and You

have

Lied to me.

Caroline Shank
6.20.25

Sammy hides from me. He
wags his cognac tail under
the couch.  He peeks at me
through umber eyes and I melt.

Sammy runs around my feet,
careful not to trip me up.
He's not interested in my tears
but watches carefully to see
if he deserves a treat.

He wants the treat from me alone.  Sammy pants from
below and I tease him.  He
likes the challenge for a moment.

Sammy comes when I call
him.  He knows my smell.
I promise not to get another
amber colored puppy licking
my fingers for more. Always
more.

Sammy doesn't know my
heart.  He just dances for
his supper.

Caroline Shank

You were always on the edge
of someone's disaster Mikey.
You sailed through days
with no wind.
Swam when the boat tipped,
sailed alone when it didn't.

You needed wings to soar above,
a paddle to stay upright.
You did not trust the water,
the air, the shore, the fire.

You were upside down,
you lost the rope.
you cut loose.

You are nobody's
adventure now.

Not even the rain.

Caroline Shank

I don't have anything to hold
you to me.  No picture or voice.
Do not go, but turn
if you feel the draft of your
name brush against you.
Know that it is I who sent it.  

I am a listener these days.
Listening for your voice
that called my name.

I do not publish you but
gently unscroll the days,
those summer days, so
short, when you said

forever.


Caroline Shank

Would you choose to deny
me?  I can't breathe.  I am
filled with love for my family,
for God.  I am only old.
You will be too, you who
would triage my life out.

I contribute to my family.
I dig with both of the
hands God gave me in
the soil and grow beautiful
things.  I am flower fresh.

I am not broken.  No one
is broken.  You who think
you can save the life of
a younger person.  

Save Me.

I could be your mother.
Save her.  When you
make a choice remember
I was here first.  The Universe
is Random.  Tilt your
thought to  philosophy.

I have miles to go before
I sleep.  If you choose
the old ones, the infirm,
the besotted the young

Will remember you also

In

Time.


Caroline Shank


Prompt: the ethics of
triaging ventilators.

You are the wind.
You are the words.

Down in the hollows of
my throat you are
the songs I hum.

Your growl sounds
take me out of me.

Lay me down.
Ta dumm

Strum me.

I am the riff from
your guitar..
Play me now.  

Turn up the radio.
"It's been a long long
time."

"Play me."


Caroline Shank


Conway and Neil
and me.

I dream too much.  I have an
imagination the size
of a planet.
I stay up all night, sleep
like a cat.  Watch movies
on the TV.

I sink and rise and
sink again. Dream
sporadically
of you.  

I think of
past loves.  
It's what getting

old does to me.  You are
the audience for my poems.  
Language is unspoken.
I doze until

Six A.M. when all
my senses call me
to beware.  The night
is hiding and my
thoughts fade into
daylight.

I am on the way
to yet another
dream.

You are the
music.

Tango me tonight?


Caroline Shank

Did you see the one about the
serial killer?  Or the making of
Die Hard?

Laying back in my chair the TV
drones on.  The world as I
know it spins out of control.

It's going to be a landscape
of empty restaurants and
breadlines.  Of bad hair
and toilet paper.

Don't feel safe in the
tribulation.  A white horse
is about to wait at your
locked gate.
.

Caroline Shank

She does not have regrets.

She dodges them.  She turns

herself around, 

sits upside down.


Elle n'a pas de regrets.

As Edith might say.


She has eruptions,

trembling hands.

headaches, sweat stains.


She occasionally pretends 

she is full of  joy. She pays 

for the coins.  


Somewhere in the

night images dance,

they sing.  She wakes to


sorrow that another day 

arrives.  


She is just a pedestrian.

who shares an occasional

joy with strangers

who love her.


She paints regret

with a smile.


Caroline Shank

You, Still There.

Picture me if you will,
like Minever Cheevy
leaning against the wall.

I thought and thought
about a kitchen you have
never seen,  my creamy
coffee, and the cat.

The blur on my face
is you. Your brown
beard streaked with
white..  No one can

make out the riddle
of you.  I keep singing
This is the dawning of
the age of asparagus.

You laugh and my face
crumples with the memory
of that, now nearly muted,
dear sound.

When will you be gone?
I scrub to no avail. I look
At myself, lost in the memory
of your death, standing by
for you to tell me something

about coffee.  

The blur
gets bigger as I rub

harder.

Your face clings to me
and I am lost

In the magic of your

song.


Caroline Shank
03.28.2024

I write to please the gods of
unloving.  The manuscripts
are read in the dark. Red eyes
pierce my dreams. I am a
pencil with yellow lead.

Only the darkness can read
the heavy lines of Purgatorial
rhymes.  I do not like rhyming
I'm not very good at it.

I am a mangle pushing out
sheets of my mind,
wrung for you.
Don't say that.  You don't want
to matter.  I have listened
to the susurrus of that tune

before.

I scribe my songs
on parchment skin…
I am a private person.
It is alone that I belong
to this notebook.   It's the
scores of fifty years of

watching for you.  Gone now.
Everywhere are the trinkets,
the baubles.  Even the cat is
quiet. Her quest
to find you is
exhausting.  

I write to the sound

of me calling
you
in the dark..


Caroline Shank

Vacation

Florida stretches from nose to
fingertips.  The bold noise of up
here relaxes into  saltwater
beaches.  

I walk along tidepools and search
for wildlife burrowing in the sands
outer banks. The sun is my
companion. We know each other
well.

My tan hands reach for you and
we are stones in the wind.
To love is enough.  To touch
is the breeze of  night.  We
stay still in a swirling mass
of gulls.

Tomorrow is Return,  Today
is the prayer for the birds
to bring their young  to my
castle.

Castles fall,  Dreams lie for a
moment where the seas spilt
the sweat anxźd salt of love

lost  


Caroline Shank
9.14.23

I am tumbling downhill
like an Autumn leaf
disarranged from the
pack.  I am caught by
the wind of your disease.

I allow your sickness to
flourish in you.  I have
no choice.  Broken is
what you feel, sadness
is my experience.

I am crisp with failure.
A small dry vein
along the tip of today,
I owe you my apology.
You have not earned
it.  But still I cry.

You, who do not see
me, cannot capture the
desiccation of my
soul.


Caroline Shank

wind wraps around me
I breathe in the winter air
the cold ice crack snaps


Caroline Shank

I did not do that. The blotch
is the size of the sun
Methods of communication.
Failed mornings.

You saw the results of my
conversation before I did
Information quarreled with
meanings.. What should
be is not a reason to be.

Again the day begins with
prayer.  The end of prayer
cannot be its beginning.
The early morning empty

verses die of loneliness.
I die of repetition, of
stomach crunching fear.

I cannot find the night
in the car, the ******
shorts, your silence
drills me a lobotomy.

All this be the ends
of days and thought
moves slowly
backwards.

Caroline Shank
10.9.2023

Now travels with me like skin.
It's always there.  I can't feel
yesterday.  But I remember.

I remember lp records and
playrooms for the kids.  Me.
I remember Mrs Cleaver
and Donna Reed.
Father knew best.

Make out parties.  Devil
or Angel.  Slow dancing.
Egg creams and cigarettes
at thirteen were a quarter
a pack.

Football. First in ten do it
again.  Cheers and jeers.

The lake behind the school
where we met to go to
the drag races.

Dancing at First **** on
Saturday nights.  The Dog,
The Bird, of course the
Twist.  

Bobby socks,poodle skirts
and crinoline,
boys in in pink and gray.  
Fads.

Getting my driver's license.
Big Boy and Bonnie Doon's
Driving the packed streets
in and out through the
circuit.  All kids all night.

Sleepovers and 35 cent
movies.

But I digress.  Now is
creaks and coughs.  Today
is viewed through rheumy
eyes.  

Now is like walking through
air dragging memory and
tomorrow's shopping lists.

That really is All There Is,
My Friend, said Mae
West I think.  If I can
remember.

Caroline Shank

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my star to keep.


I see from out my window all
the patterns in the sky merge
for one moment to the sound
of Angels trumpets.

Tonight is the time for kneeling
and watching as the sky turns
dark blue and gives off a light
only once at the stroke of
midnight.  A Star reserved
for you, a motion singular
and unmoving.  And with
a closed eye the Universe
sings.

Caroline Shank

Look Around

The sky is melting  not falling
as has been

mentioned earlier.
Your notes are Incomplete.

Tomorrow the Ether will roll
out a tapestry of your life..
The colors are[

posies of opinions like chameleons

peering

into adolescent
Misunderstanding

standing In a corn field
looking around

Find a body and your
touch can

Spread the stain of

Un
Opinions applied with a
gravelled voice.

Shout  back…

“Blow it out your ***.”


Caroline Shank
March, 14, 2019

When I die I want to be
in love with you.
I want to take with me
your tender care.  I don't

want to leave you without
you knowing that a large
piece of the fabric

of me

was you.

I want to experience

you,

the breathless catch
which surprises me
everytime I think

of you.

The thought under the song
of you loving me   The words
of prayers, in so many
languages.  We were
Blessed to know that
love was our predestined

Minute.

We for whom God planned,
in the beginning, a banquet
of days.  Not years.

When I die I want to take
your voice breathing
our names,

over and over again.

          God give us a lifetime,

          for a minute.

         You and me.

         A prayer

         Returned.




Caroline Shank
10.8.2024

Whispers

She whispers in his ear
of the love grown so long
out of the shelter.  

She says
how much she loves him.

He hears the
trumpets,

God's voice.



Caroline Shank
2.6.2025

Haiku.    Snow

Winter comes early
The leaves are not yet raked in
The snow covers all.

Tell me


again about flush toilets and hot
water.

I want you to keep it up,  I
sit and sit and “think about

it.
How good my life is.
.
Tell Me stuff of legends.
How God is good.

How love is to one's soul
as rain helps the Garden
    Grow.

Beat It into my failing
feeling.  The heart is
only prescribed to the



Foolish.

Tell Me Again


Tell me to stop weakening
with each flash of you.
Each belly flop of

your caring.

My turn at sublimation
leaves tears on my vocabulary.

To be Wise for you  is to be
as the lonely clef

under songs.

Daylight drives me cold
into

the
Lonely

Night


Caroline Shank
January 9, 2025

Long ago, miles and miles
ago,  you'd think I'd have
forgotten.  I remember so
many things.

I've learned that a tree down
still remembers its first leaf.
That the moon remembers
its first sunset.  I've learned
to understand then, that the
first beating of your
existence on my heart
remembers you.

Send me a signal that I
may see the first fragments
of your hand in mine,
the first dance in the
dark, the first look
we knew as always.

Let me not go without
one signal that you knew,
once, the colors of my
name you whispered
on my skin that night
you said goodbye.

The years have frailed me,
but not so much that I
could not relive that
sole and singular summer.

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

I found the end where I thought
it was too soon. The vestigal
wrapping of time is in the
dance.  The Nun’s habits
rustle.

There is dust in his eyes.
The sun is blotted out.
My mistaken opinion
forsakes him.

The dish of songs in my
late nights repertoire is
only food for the
neighbor's cat

I am hearing him
Pipe. The trembling
of my heart

Is the only sssooo
uuunnndd.

Caroline Shank
6.12.2024

I vape sometimes.  I am into
Self determination.  No drinking
I thumb my nose at the 50s.

I'm old now. I float you Mother
There are no cocktails.  You

were a dream of mid century
hedonism. I saw you as the
Cleopatra of Barberry

Drive.

My milk tastes of you.
I vape occasionally
and walk to the edge
of tomorrow.

Take me O Lord. Let me
not know.  Push my head
into nights endless abyss.

Let tomorrow anoint my
scrambled hopes that
even tonight I

dare

you to be

Real

My love


Caroline Shank
May 28.2025

People touch people in some
free-form folding of lives,
briefly, changing shapes,
always re-emerging against
new sides, blending like
figures on a screen, always
in motion, changing colors,
signifying some never-ending
continuum, floating in a
liquid teeming with
possibility, sliding
into each other, skin to
skin for the length of a
second.  Touch is the
brush of friends
at anchor.


Caroline Shank

Virginia stuffed her pockets
with stones. I'm sure you have heard this before.  It was a
gray day.  I imagine late afternoon.

Cleared of all the syllables and punctuations she
was free to lower her so
skinny body into her shoes,
her bare feet covered with
crackled leather.

Another day and she would
have had a party to which
Richard would attend.  Perhaps
flowers, perhaps wine from
their favorite snug.  

The water was her aim, the
fruit of scraping glaciers her
goal.   I think of her when
skies turn purple with tears
windy days cascade
over me.

I haven't got the scenes rehearsed in my soul as
she must have done.  
Leonard heard her skin
call cry.  He found her pale
hand,

but


his tears were not enough.

Caroline Shank

The get together, the
conversation like snowflakes
melts to gin. The baubles
in the cake discarded.
Laughter, like a drunken
fruitcake, soaks in 🎭 ***.

We leave our coats behind.
The owner looks on in enebriated
unbelief and goes  to bed.

It is cold and Christmas contents
scatter behind backyard bushes.
We fall on the ice to gales of
hiccup and yelps of pain.

Our outdated traditions look
out on faces, missed at the party,
***** of belongingness.

Someone said that Christ is the
reason, but the customary
exchange gleaned
in moments, is glaringly
missed and the broken
heart turns over.
The sad neglect
which is mother of
this sadness, is seen
by the enebriate a tribute
to those who laugh.
  

Caroline Shank

Happy Birthday

My son is brave, kind
and good.

He slid into the light,
caught by uncertainty.
Out of the Dim and
Quiet he marched the
one thousand days.

Mute mother and crying.
Exhaustion.
Life was always in the
next room.

My son reached for the
barre of imagination.,
Cries of indignation.
The room reverbated.

Music of my youth in
his mouth. He ******
the flowers.  The walls

folded around him in
a swaddlle embrace.

Lordy lord the past of
my anthology cries.

Birthday is to Kevin
as life is joy to me.


Caroline Shank
7.19.2024

There is no world without
you in it.  The climb up times
ladder
is empty of rungs.

There is fire in my mind.
There are clinging bones,
clogs
Of dislocation.  Tomorrow
rests on the slippery south
of today.

If you deliquesce there where
you daysay
I may slip on what remains.

The rest is not my business.
I have two worlds
to choose from
on a bare basis of
belief.

There is no sense to science.
Blow up the universe
to your expectation of ruin
and

I never knew my own
legend.


Caroline Shank
10.22.2024

The numbers of sin’z
scales written ,
of
her inequities is
like bells on
Christmas
morning.

Never silent She (I)

is
capable
of great

misunderstandings.

Tomorrow's multiplying
the rotations
around the

streetlamp.
Kids we were singing
And cLapping

Every time today is
crumpled.

Lights on the ground.

Not forever (me)
Again.

Sing a song of
Six
pence

inevitably.

And she died of
bleach.
Scrubbing Hands burn.

He left on a
weekday.

Today
when I was
Young.

Tomorrow and tomorrow
and tomorrow

was a play

after all.



Caroline Shank
2.18.2025

Sometimes

Sometimes I just sit. Wading
thru thoughts.  The cells
of my future
capture
the nonloves of mythical
proportion

I have clocks all over
the walls.  We tic
together.
White sheet rock,
flat line.  Everyone’s
story is coded in the
cells.

The walls are
dry. I see names
Scri+++ names.
Thought comes and
GOs.

Tomorrow will slide over
me in an ecstasy of

feeding.

I will sit and count the
days until my sorry

***

goes….. .



Caroline Shank
7.17.2024

Now what? You might well

ask. After the halcyon days

in Florida? After the debt

of childbearing?  After the

years of budgets?  Now what?


Back in the cold, the kids

grown, the still unsettled

finances?  I'm old and faded.


What happens to this

country song that is 

my life?  I am going to 

dance.  Still hold out my 

card to you.


The dance we have left

is slower, but the music

still travels up my spine.

Yes that's what.  I 

save the last dance

for you. 


It's just the way I roll.


Caroline Shank

1.2.20

She could not abide the
accolades.  Every syllable
scratch and poked through
her.  Layer after layer the
thorns of praise tore her

until one day she stowed
stones in her pockets.
She walked along the
side of the water, not
thinking now, not even
the recitation of reasons.

Thousands of words
behind her and she
did not think they
mattered.  She walked
along the bank and
gathered pieces of
granite.  She hoarded
these like treasures

until she had enough.
The first step was
cold but unnoticed.

She walked into her
death like a nun who
no longer feared the
confessional.

Her hair floated around her
like seaweed, fingers
like fish.  She stopped
the flowers of language

until there were no
more petals.  She died
consumed by a
brownness welcomed
after the lighthouse
darkened.

Mrs Dalloway
never gladly held
another day.


Caroline Shank

For us it was pure recreation, the
flap ends of days at work
We saw the night sky lighten to
the moon’s yellowed ends.

Our signals were these - -
the free
formed contacts of those who
worked in the dark.

Every time thru touch we
exolored the tiny motions,
the fingertip braille of meanings.

Then the scattered
motions slung across
the disarray-
the darkness of
lamps shutting off,

of
beds silenced, sheets
unmoved

ever again.

Not to return uncovered the
indifference, the mistaken
edges of a vocabulary grown
only
in my carved thoughts.

Feeling  blurred into
the dim haze of

indifference.

Touch

slid

away.



Caroline Shank
2.29.2024

We dug with bare hands
each to the other.  Sifting
minutes into memory,
language into clover.

We spread our hands
gave life a chance and
the Universe said Yes.

We haven't changed a
minute.  We share the
telepathy of souls,
the candles of passion.

Tomorrows infinite,
reaching into each
other,

roots entwined.


Caroline Shank

Write what I know?  I am pocked with
chunks of broken moments.
Bits fall to the ground, trip me.
The terrain of my youth is a
moonscape.  I know what I know in
the craters of this place.

Born on the darkside and thirsty I was
cold.  I found the sun later when I
was tumbled out the door of my
Mother’s leaking house.  Her screams
had become tentacles of maniacal
music.  Or do not call it music for
if you had heard it you would not dance.

I am old now.  The view from my landing
is filled with sunlight and children,
“There are children in the leaves,
laughing excitedly”.  
I am rescued from this debris on
occasion.

When she is quiet,
I sweep her under the porch
where she lies drunk and unlaughing.
I do not let her out.  Yet she
steers me.  Her corpse loud
in her ***** nightdress.  

The terrain of my old age is pitted
with the debris of this haunting.  She
unsings me, makes me lie in
craters from which I climb up
daily only to tumble back down,
to have to begin again
from the bottom each new **** day.

But I sing as I crawl. And
she does not like the sound of that.

The archaic symbols of the dream
appear nightly stained on some
gigantic scrim.  There’s a battle
going on in one corner, a damsel
is at stake of course; her favors
his reward.  Somewhere else is a
monkey holding a tin cup and
pant-hooting at passers by.
There will be some trouble if he
doesn’t get his pennies.  More
I suppose if he does.

A man and a woman face each other;
she prepares bandages for his war.
The problem is she can’t reach the
victims he piles up.

Birds fly, horses fly, lizards slither
out of holes each with pieces of’
paper fluttering from their mouths.
The paper disappears leaving only
sockets without sound.

The dream is incomplete without the man,
standing still in the middle, his spear
pointed up.  He cannot move
and the tears on his face
are children.



11/11/80


CSS publications 2nd place winner 8/84  $25.00

Pandemic


Time folds into itself like a
hand wraps around its own
fingers.   Minutes go into
seconds, the reverse of
times own practicality.

I waver between the worlds
of sleep and starking
wakefulness.  I move
during the disconnections
of place and action.

I will arrive, as Eliot said,
at a place of beginning.
Not to recognize my
neighbor is a conclusion
forgone as the inversion
of time depletes me.

This is sacred time
ordained by nature.
I thrive or succumb
and in the end I will
be very different.

I morph as the virus
spreads nature.
That time will end for
me is its only goal.

The pandemic is
unbleached.  I
sacrifice myself
to the gods of
unknowing.

Caroline Shank


Prompt:. Covid-19

We walked together not saying
a word.  It was Summer, the
lake was blue and we held hands.  
Not so unusual you might say.

The city was behind us then.
Tall buildings of wind washed
brown and gray lined the
streets.  You looked
at me gently folding.

I asked for one more day.  
We spent the last of
time quietly.  Tomorrow would
not be there for us.  We return
to the hologram of ourselves.
Long goodbyes, unheard chimes
of weddings that were not ours.

I mean, so much of the lives of
others are meant for each of us.
I bend my head against the wind
and whisper these words,

I live
always,
you.


Caroline Shank

Do you remember the rain?
You were soaked and the
only thing you heard was
my voice crying in the
wildness of that starless
night.

Later you were so calm.  
I was in a void,
medicated to save
my life.  We saw
each other across
the cigarettes of
scarred conversation.

Do you remember
your hands on my face?

Personne ne se souvient

Is it too much, this drought
of time? These long misted
years clutch the past
like a pout of pain.



Caroline Shank

I don't want to waste your time.
Waste, baste, taste.  Lick the *** clean, clean, bean, dream whoops bad rhyme.

I don't want you to read me
so closely.  Read, bead, seed.
I rhyme to know I am alive.

Like a bee buzzes, dances on
flowers, makes honey, bunny, sunny, money.

Don't try me out until you have tasted me, peanut butter and jelly on white bread, toasted me.
Bananas like Elvis.  Home schooled and everything, ping, fling, ding.  I love you.  

I don't want to sing, ring, bing,
ting.  Call me.  I will tell you
the truth.  

You don't love me really, dilly, silly way to rhyme your time

away.

Caroline Shank

Why should I stay?  I can
find no existential reason
to do so.

Family?  That is emotional
blackmail.  I cannot defy
their reason, but I can't
make sense of it.

I see worms in my soup,
snakes in my dresser
drawers.  Everywhere I
look there is putrefaction.

I am to be cremated.  My
Urn waits with it's label
already in place.

But! Hear the reasons
why I stay.  My God,
my soul's supporter is
not ready for me.  This
I believe.  That when it
is time for me to leave
the violence of this place
I will be shown the way.

This I believe.  That my
family is succour to my
pain and I am grateful
for them.  My children
are made of the same
stuff that gods are made
of. My grandchildren bloom
with my vision of purity.

The worms will not have
me as long as I have You
to listen.  You who are my
soul's radio.  I turn the
hymn of Your life on

and wait.

Caroline Shank

The phone rings
Saturday is bath night
Monday laundry.

No Amish here
said Peter.

Sleep is a distant
Relative

You are a mask
.
I told you.

You aré
my attachment
to things

Christmas and

This tea ceremony

Blesses our union.

And our children.

We escaped
The introduction
Made love and

drank a toast.
The bitten
Sandwich

grew into

a love poem
evanescent as

Foam

Filling as
marrow
Fills the
bone.


Caroline Shank
7.14.22






.

The Dead


They waft through.
The end brushes their faces.
Reminiscent of
leaves blown against
vegetable skin.  The
landscape soaks with,
saturates with, this
growing out of season.  
Weeds rise from the inside,
and like vines, scale interior
walls, crumble stone, hiding
in the cracks while rooting
for the breast of destruction.


Lives are spread out.
Spilled flowers, and at
the last it all lay written
across the years when the
pulsing, fecund ending, still
in pieces was unfolding
in the weeds.


You don’t know nuthin’ folks.
They wait like children who
know exactly when to get into
locked gardens the mothers
left for a minute for
groceries or shopping, for
a cocktail, meaning to return,
only to linger over the
afternoon.

If you gasp folks in the
second before reality finds
you counting your blessings,
you never looked them in
the face, never saw the
wind part the sky in front
of them, never touched the
ivy stuffing the holes,
where the sadness milks into.


Go home, the dead have
already bloomed.  You can’t
find them in the landscape
of their ends if you have
to ask.  You never knew that
Death which, on the ground,

blows around our faces.


Waits.







5. 14.92

Revised 7.25.24

Beloit Poetry Journal  rejected 7/14/91
The Limberlost Review rejected 8/15/92
The Little Magazine rejected 1/23/93

You will not keep me
Winter warn
Or
Summer cool.
The arms
that were to be

mine

Are gone.

There is a cry in my
throat that

Loosed

would
stain the earth
and sky.

Brown,  teak,
sadness.

Lost again

Secula, seculorem.

Caroline Shank
6.06.25

Remember Me

Light is falling through the
Sleeves of my longing.

That's pretty good.  You
take me into the grotte
of imagination.  You

Nudge me
And I grapple with the
silence of rhymes.

Long was the life
time spent in the

whorle of loving.

The verbs I write
at all in the shadow where
my desk rests on the
faux brick wall are quiet

against the window curtain.

And I breathe.

Not all poetry calls you to
me as Sara writes. It's
the literature of my life

as I walk alone on the
beach where we stood

and Kissed that last
Night

The waves off Sarasota
splashed against us

The gulls screeched.

Taps sounded in the
night’s wind..

And I am fragile. I
sleep late and stay
out of the sun.

You may remember my
face.  

My stumble.

The last morning of

the

World.


Caroline Shank
February 12, 2025