Angelhead (not like my brother)

Angelhead (not like my brother), a photo by justin haynes on Flickr.

Angelhead (not like my brother)

My brother saw the face of God. You never recover from a trauma like that. He was sixteen, shouting for help in the darkness of his room in our new suburban home. I was ten. I stood watching from his doorway, still, eyes cinched up tight as seams, trying to make out his writhing shape. I saw for myself. I didn’t see God, of course, but I saw my brother seeing God; I saw how petrified he was, how convinced. I knew, still know, that he saw, in some form, His or Her or Its face. It was in the window, a part of the night, shimmering over our neighborhood of new construction sites—clear plastic stapled to boards and waving in the night breeze, tire-tracked mud, portable toilets.

Blake saw angles in trees. Thoreau imagined the possibility of divinity, the sublime, in a “knot-hole.” Whitman saw God in the salivating mouth of a soldier’s bullet hole. I used to watch a man who lived on the streets of San Luis Obispo, California who would spend hours shouting “Jesus” while in paroxysms, drooling, his fly open.
But they didn’t see Him. None of them.
Not like my brother.