The Face of God
He stood, a short, slightly heavy dark-haired man, on the curb of the freeway exit onto the suburban commercial strip, his body hunched around something bulging his coat in the March wind. I couldn’t read the cardboard sign, but his message was clear. It was hard to switch lanes, though I saw someone ahead of us better positioned to attend him swerve over.
Stopped at the light, the left lane open, I fumbled the only bill I had in my pocket, rolled down the window. It wasn’t much, but it would buy him a meal. It was then that I saw the small black-and-white dog wrapped close to his chest.
The man was neither young nor old. I don’t remember his features, saw him only long enough to hand him the ten and exchange God-bless-you’s. Do you remember the way when Robin Williams smiled a kind of transcendent surrender seemed to overflow his eyes (think Fisher King), planting you right there in the holy ground of the human?
The man walked back to kneel on blankets spread on the concrete and appeared to be comforting the dog, talking to it. Krista noticed him blowing on his bare hands. That’s when I flung open the door and tossed him my mitts.
The light turned. I don’t know what the man saw, or his shivering short-haired friend, looking at me through the window, but I had seared my vision on the face of God. I thought of the money I’d just spent on clothes in the city and for the first time believed I knew why some few rumored souls give away all they own and from then on have no purpose except to relieve the suffering of others and keep that face before their eyes.
Thomas R. Smith is a poet living in western Wisconsin. He has recently edited a collection of Robert Bly’s essays on poetry, The Garden Entrusted to Me. His new poetry collection Heaven and Nature is forthcoming from Nodin Press. He posts poems and essays at thomasrsmithpoet.com.
Amethyst Review 
Very moving.
LikeLike