Penitenziario

In every soot-scabbed

and black-bricked alley

stale paper, wet with morning damp,

catalogues and cartoons,

thread & spool among the rubbish, angels among it,

germ set to bud       to curl

greenly to open,       to gasp in the cog–work of mind—

raise leagues of creatures, the many-faced, the flightless,

and while glory there, while the altar’s parts

found salvage there what song

what monarch-winged

rescue for me?

My prayers have not been idle

though maybe too soft, scratched out, re-traced,

only poor jewels      which is to say humble, only

humble perhaps to say small,

but whole in what

love I could breathe into them

—and maybe though my prayers are unbeautiful

it is good. That they lie with the frayed and careworn

edges of my collars, my tireless pages, meager and meek as the lamb

gone after its master—

that their opening in to the dark and unkempt

is enough.

It is the only          the one thing,

my lone and muffled vesper.