Tadpole Baptismal

He is pruning the rose bushes, like he’s supposed to.
Homework has been done, like it’s supposed to be.
Everything is as it is supposed to be,
and yet he jabs savagely with the scissors.
The sky is gray, the thorns are sharp, and the roses are dull.

Mosquitoes buzz above the pool while spiders lounge on forgotten floats.
The sand filter is broken, and the water is stagnant,
the perfect incubator for bellowing toads and brown water insects
that buzz busily on the seedy skim of their biohazard kingdom.
He snips above the grouping of five leaves, as he is supposed to.

Then he hears a voice from heaven, just as he’d always imagined it,
and he sees an ordinary looking man, dressed in blue shirt and jeans.
The man’s face is blurry in its plainness, and the man’s head reflects the sun.
He drops the scissors, dead rose petals pelting the hot concrete.
The toads are silent, and then begin to complain.

Kneel the man says, and he does what he is told,
on the white plastic side of the teeming pool.
The man does the same on the opposite side of the pool,
looking at him across rotting water noodles and skating bugs.
He finds himself rolling up his sleeves for some reason.

The man begins to splash his lower arms and face with the lukewarm water
and he does the same, washing himself with the filth of the broken pool.
I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Where the disgusting water has touched him, he feels clean.
The sky is still gray, the roses still dull, but he is new.

With no theatrical flash of light or even a dove, the man disappears.
He stares down at the same old pool, noting with interest
the plethora of tadpoles and brown crawling spiders.
He picks up the scissors and keeps clipping above the clusters of five leaves.
He has been baptized in tadpoles and filth, so different from the “supposed to” and is cleansed.