I loved you at the first of dawns,
the first of lights,
when in damp, green darkness
a first of seeds cracked open
by the incredidle warmth of -

I loved you at the first of noises,
when, fallen from the sky,
something pure was ripped open
and forever spoilt.
a scream the birth of pain,

and when, in the night you came alive
blood started flowing through your veins like
the waters licking the earth
hungrily.

I love you now,
it's crooked limbs
stretched eternally onward like gum,
a hummingbird's golden lustre in stasis.

When I silently love you tomorrow,
and all of the embers
have turned brittle like bone dust,
between the falling stars
into the great sea,
in a constellation will whisper
the lovers and the sun.

The eyes were still open
On the still life.
There's the difference
Between crossing the road
And dying in your sleep.
So, look both ways
Before crossing me.

Help me make it through
Oh God of my unknowing
Brace MY name unto
even the farthest heartbeat.

The clocks dim.
I no longer hear the
movement.
.
Hand of years, the
children and the
getting. Minutes
bend the geography.

Take
me to the
honeyfields.  

I lie
down

to Sleep

I pray.



Caroline Shank
12.16.2022

The olive dusk tents overheard,
pleated, wavering, starless,

ghostly, embossed with moon,
scratched with street light.

Cars hunt across a new ice blanket,
casting tambourine shakes

onto the pavement as they brake
in cherry arrays. Tonight I watch

my neighbors in their curious coves,
each jaundiced room a flat Argus eye,

as they bed down, break off
the lamp network, pull blinds down

over myriad invisible couplings.
I have hesitations in the dark.

I see the neon-breasted giants
towering towards midnight

in this aching pavilion.
Like prisoners we send messages

with our mirrors.
At the Christmas market,

an etched man sells fake Egyptian
canoptic jars. "Viscera," he says,

"it holds your heart after you die."
The jar looks like it was carved

last week by a bored child.
Even if our hearts shrunk

to apricot pits, abandoned,
betrayed, disappointed, this jar

couldn't hold even one.
Still, I consider it for a moment.

But the olive tent is waving to me:
no sale, no sale, no sale.