I stepped out, dripping wet in my fist-
cinched towel, and everybody was gone.
Opened the window: silent streets, cars
idling at stoplights, lonely blowing breeze.
I never imagined there were so many devotees,
unless everything we’ve been told
about the rapture
isn’t true.
And what is that, exactly? I’m no authority.
But I know a rapture when I see one.
₪
How am so I sure it was the rapture?
I know it was because
there was a Hallmark-styled
greeting card sitting upright on the kitchen table:
I went toThe Rapture
and all Yougot
was thisLousy Card!
The drawing on its front showed
a frowning-faced man
shrugging, palms of both hands upturned
and empty
while in the background manifold winged souls
zoomed serenely toward clouds in the heavens
parted like velvet curtains in a movie theater.
God’s twinkly eye peeked
around one fluffy cumulus
edge—watching, waiting, welcoming all the new
arrivals.
₪
Don’t get me wrong—I appreciate the thought
but whoever left it was sort of insensitive.
₪
I began to wonder: was it
the soap that protected me, or the shampoo?
Or a combo? Later I looked for warnings—
may prevent rapturing—but couldn’t find any
labeled advisories.
Did some atheist
scientists (or scientific
atheists) realize, or suspect
the effects, and was this their way
of defying God’s will, of thumbing
their well-scrubbed
and perfumed noses
at even the notion of an afterlife?
₪
Clean, and solitary, the answer
ceased to matter.
Yet every day since, I step into the tub
again, and
lather, rinse, repeat,
lather, rinse, repeat,
lather, rinse, repeat, no
tears formula soapy suds
streaming down
my cheeks
like the salty secretions
these eyes can’t muster.