Hope, slowly pathed in the
clear smoke of a joint,
gone.  

Caged aspirations.  Who
gave permission to stoke
the mourners,
to increase the music?

In the wake of his youth
he said No to the sight
of lost doors.  Thrown
stones.

Where were you when
the dancing began? The
title of the sermon undone
in the

Church

Of

Insanity.


Caroline Shank
9.1.2022

"Everyone goes away in the end"
Cash sings, his anthem to the
times he left behind.

When, if, in the event I have not
returned, the song will still
sound the name of our child.
Life will spread the remains
of our faded experience.  

Return to the signposts, those
arrows who should have
run while the music was in love.

There was smoke in the air
Hernando.

Poems are

steps

along the edge.


Caroline Shank
8.29.2022

The shirt dropped to the floor as I
reached to stop it.  I thought it
terribly unfair.   It fell first.

She thinks the first she knew was
saddened by the thought she was
not the first.

It happens before
speech or breathing.  

Tomorrow is over first. Today's
blooms have fallen before
its scent prys recognition.

Reality, is the happy accident of
memory.  It was at the beach
that I realized that

you arrived first. I only

remembered you.


Caroline Shank

I recently had that flash of
"Oh My God! "

The shirt dropped to the floor as I
reached to stop it.  I thought it
terribly unfair.   It fell first.

She thinks the first she knew was
saddened by the thought she was
not the first.

It happens, whatever "it" is, before
speech or breathing.  

Tomorrow is over first. Today's
blooms have fallen before
its scent prys recognition.

Reality, I said recently in some
class, is the happy accident of
memory.  It was at the beach
that I realized that

You arrived first. I only

remembered you.


Caroline Shank


8.27.2022

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

I sit here.  

The winds
of late summer
sweep the curls of
dust over the
linoleum floor.

I think about
what it is to be declined,
to be culled out
as a small fish
is thrown back to the boy.

It was a rush
we exceld in
those years when

all I ever wanted was you,
and the music on the juke box in
the corner booth.  You wore
red plaid, but
it was your eyes that
portalled always,
the galleries we
explored frequently before
love.

I smoke a cigarette
or something,

inhale the evening.
think of the
Excavations:

The Creases of Conversation
that reflect in madness.
The Manuscripts of memory
scribed in
the night.

I lean into Friday.



Caroline Shank
8.25.2022

I remember you,  the midnight
phone calls you wanted me to
listen to, your day,  your work,
your other life.

The time, like clinking money, falls
into the jar on the mahogany
telephone table.   The same dark
wood grain on which I trace the
date of our first date,  kiss, the
only memory to last unchanged

by time,  by events,  by the wine.

The bottom of the glass where the
cheap red box's liquid left the drain
of midnight conversations is  now
this soggy epistolary testament.  

Don't tell me that you toast to a
frail collapsed container such
as is love unknown to the daylight,
the sidewalks of experience.

You only knew in me a triffle,
a while, of white pages.  
I knew you in the
dark sonnets of poetry.

Then you closed your sentence with
a masculine ending like
a gun shot across the page.  

Caroline Shank