Smoke

Birthday cake, or campfires. That’s what match smoke smells like.

Or sometimes when you light a candle for someone.

Faces. A woman’s face. Sometimes I’ll catch them in a flash: a true love in another universe, eternity flashing across her dark eyes, and then she’s gone, on another train or as the line moves along, the wave of humanity washing the street clean again with an ebb, and well, oh well.

Those are some faces.

But the face can sear.

I saw hers Wednesday, in the busy afternoon. The blue had just started to creep onto the bare trees, shadows filling the bowl that’s Roanoke, and a thousand other drivers negotiated three lanes down to two, and we all jostled and twitched and curled a lip with a lackluster eye of the commuter in merging traffic.

She leaned over her cardboard sign, right near the curb, and her face, her face, in a flash and then, too late I was gone.

Some venom etched fifty extra years onto thirty with a livid hand. Something else lived there. Something had gotten her. Materialists would call it heroin. Therapists would call it trauma. A preacher would call it the devil. The January snow will call her home.

(But I hope not.)

Who’s to say about redemption, of who doesn’t, and who does, and when?

So the last shall be first, and the first last.

The old lady in A Good Man Is Hard To Find recognizes Grace the instant before her murder.

I won’t write the Face’s story. But she’s been with me, somehow, and I’d hate to forget her.

Sometimes I’d play street music, and they’d think I was homeless, and nobody would ever look at me.

So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.

The stars are bright tonight. It will be cold. The match smoke lingers. I’ve lit a candle for her.