Immaculate

As long as I am alive,
showers will be in fashion.
Even today's medieval ladies
will have clean hair.
They will have clear skin
and bright eyes
and a coat of transparently
pink polish on their fingernails.
These baronesses
will all brush their
wavy Rapunzel hair with
brushes made out of
synthetic hog bristles
and they will brush their teeth
with professionally designed
pieces of plastic,
using paste or gel
with fluoride, baking soda,
and magical whitening properties,
available in a variety
of refreshing flavors.
These gentlewomen
will buy perfumes from
WalMart if they have bad agents
or they will wear Chanel No. 5
if they have good agents.
They will get a pedicure
every other week.
These exhalted queens
will spend three weeks a year
at a special beauty spa in Swizerland
where they will be charged
an exorbitant amount of money
to have their porcelain faces
painted with all-natural mud
as part of what their
professional beauty experts call
"a centuries-old recipe
for healthy, glowing skin."
These experts insist
that all the fairy tale princesses
used this very type of mud--
Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Maid Marian.
The stories are made up,
But the women, they say,
are real, even though
showers didn't become fashionable
until after they had been dead for centuries.
Now their memories and their bones
will stay cleaner
than their skin could ever be,
part of the moist and sanitary earth.