I submit to you the plan,
the blueprint,
the perfect wedding
day.  

The storybook sun of
an early fall afternoon.

Church people in  purple
and white congregate.

Congratulations are petals
on the browning lawn.

It's September of a day
pulled from memory.

The church bells scurry like
living tones let loose.
A random exercise
in hearing.

The early mark on a white
wall's
lifeline scars my woman's
soul.

Death makes the day's ride
a long goodbye.


Caroline Shank

Let Us Go

At great risk we go
through certain half deserted
streets.  The lights burn holes
in my contemplations.  The spine
of poetry is fallen and lies
spattered on the ground

Go with me. The vocabulary
inspired by the sea air will
carve runes in the granite.

We travel light. Our skin, like
canvas ingrained with words,
bleeds.

We drop to our knees in
silent supplication.  Sounds
paint where rhyme
leaves
trails.

There is no tomorrow.  


Caroline Shank

It's never going to stop
being Friday
The Birth of Sacraments
is not Good.

Autumn is Friday's punch
in the gut of Summer   It's
always Friday.  The windblown
faded days are a trampled
graveyard.

Today is Friday and if I shovel
the fake faded Forrest of time
it is always Friday.  The perennial
glare of a Gregorian mistake.

Christ died for me on a
Friday!
Illusions of time passing are
like

Prayers

blown back

on a Friday.

Today tears the pages off.  You
flip it over.

Friday appears as oil from
the flood.  


Caroline Shank
9.2.2022

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