Knox Baptism
I bought it a couple days ago at a truck stop
outside Grand Rapids and hid it
away like a talisman at the bottom
of my pack: a bar of classic Irish Spring.
My mamaw always had it
in the white porcelain
soap dish in her bathroom.
While I lathered my hands I would inhale
its chemical perfume. I would seek
the traces of its scent lingering
on my fingers on my way home.
It was a smell that was unwelcome
around my new family; they would gripe
about the lab-made tang; they would tell me
mass-produced soaps only disrupt the skin’s native flora
and that our bodies don’t need soap, which is when,
by the way, I first learned that adults lied.
They prized a narrow kind
of individuality. You were allowed
to be different exactly like everyone else.
So bland oatmeal goat-milk soap it was,
until now. I walked to the campground showers
clutching the waxy, green-and-white marbled smoothness
of the bar of Irish Spring, running my thumb
over the letters inscribed on its surface
like a monument to cleanness.
I wanted to scrub the grime
of my old life from me and be reborn
into my new one, fragranced like cut grass and water
that percolates up through mossy rocks, the way
ancient people sent their royalty to the afterlife
perfumed with precious myrrh and resins.
And what would I do after, with my life?
Good question.