"Today is the Feast of the Lost Season.
Grapefruits are hoarded in the temple and painted over.
People are grabbing and complaining.
Wine and plump breads, pagan images to the lurid Father God
are up for sale and shrunk by the imagination.
In the old days, hell came through experience.
Paradise, through the eyes.
But long predatory purgatory was always the true story
of working lives.
Now I lay me down as a minor contribution
to the great machine.
When donkeys traveled without glancing to the side,
long lashed and buckled inside their own hide.
When they bray for joy into the gray industrial clouds,
and the cows replied like balloons deflating into moos,
the strain on the immaculate heart
was as grave as it could get.
Awful pity to be so blessed as to pound for happiness."