Pagan Holiday Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I wait for customers in this bay,
Or I read Anne Sexton and hope for quaint
Stigmata, like overly dramatic Catholic plays:
Or the overly education girls from the peripheries
Of high school; I can now smell them on the wind,
And far away they should love me,
But nearer they would lose all interest,
So I keep them at bay. The customers are coming
In. They can’t afford their houses, but they don’t
Know what to do without this pagan holiday:
They wear the same clothes they wore a year ago,
They are fine and worked on and ivory, and I love
Every one of them, and the god hanging in this sky.
The power lines are conducting us through the grid,
She moves away across the unmowed grasses,
Across the everglades, her back always turned to me,
Her nape freckled and bare, maybe eleven stars,
Jupiter. I love her, but this is only another saying,
For the sacrifices are turning like satellites up in this
Sky. I was married to a woman with the same birthday,
But she doesn’t listen to that anymore, but the way
The traffic comes and goes a river going anyway,
And thus I lie down to her and repose, and sell to
Her in the dusk this pagan holiday.