Lent Prayer

The way prayer is root to precarious : two crows creep

the steeple. Not winter,

not spring. Given a chance,

a season out of season will write

bastard pastoral, elegy

full of errant splendor and spent sheets of sleet, rain all spondaic

and unrelenting. Pallid nouns look familiar

but they're dead :

after thaw, after crocuses, even tulips : new snow, and robins

caught on a border without name, lost

to a scrim of frost, dozens

dead, each a lace of lice. The way soul has

no certain etymology, how weirdly what's rootless goes

wrong-like, fog

erasing syntax that holds

nouns in the sentence called landscape, looks like : streetlight tree

snowdrop stray-cat tow-truck leaves sidewalk snowmelt : except

what's visible

shifts, wind

arranging things,

the neighbor's lit window gone down the block like a dog

off its lead.

But all the small-town lights have left

for the Susquehanna

where they lean over water and rinse long-

billed birds into shallows, cattails

that shiver

the river like quills

sunk in dark ink. If I bring

to the banks what nouns I've found,

what of it?

Clean of scene they shine

in the mind like fish flick water open, switchblade-

quick : weathervane

horse-cart milk-pail police-tape

farmhouse snowplow : if

crapping in crabgrass; on Market St.,

little flags flapping; or two Amish girls

pressing curd through cloth;

dirty water. It's written :

the opera house burned

in 1906. What is it goes on living

in a town like this, between penitentiary and nicotine, the way form lives on

in both feign and fiction : arson

or accident, the plaque says this

is the original cornerstone : because

the root of error is wander,

who wouldn't want

out of a town so wrong? The current's fed under the bridge

like fabric to a sewing needle, each light

a small satin boat

stitched slow in folds.

Who wouldn't want to go

to them,

the lights? As prayer is

route to precarious, the river trembles on its treadle.