Rain

If there’s a heaven full of bliss, I imagine

featured in full-page prominence 

on its slick catalog of prepaid shore excursions 

such a day:

You’ll sit simply on a chair full of softness, in a house full of wood and wide windows, friendly with the warm wet breath of the world, while the sky throws itself down in a fury of murmurs.

Your skin the thermostat of all nature, you will lie solid and still, except that when you choose you can suck up a double lungful of that wild perfect smell: the one that even poetry cannot name, but that is surely born of the purest rejoicing anything mineral ever makes as it moves through vegetable ways. 

If you care to glimpse you’ll witness the ghostly tapestry loom and quaver all around. But we recommend ears to hear each drop dig its soft sonorous pit in summer ground. Threads of sound, spun into the sum of a silken blanket, may threaten sweetly to slide around the mind and drag it down to idle depths.

But your safety is guaranteed: if ever in any of these viscous moments you slip too far, another long low skyward sigh will soon erupt high above in counterpoint, to perfectly reconstitute the present, and remind you of storm.

And there you will hover in thrall, thunder-punctuated, forever or for a day. Afterlife, afterlived your way.

(Pay in full upon reservation. 

No refunds given, no liability claimed. 

Void where prohibited, 

terms subject to change.)