Ezekiel in the Snow

I do not want god to take the form of a mortal man, and that's the truth. Whenever god makes an entrance you know it's not just because he was stopping in. You know it's the end when he comes. I don't want it to end. I don't want to watch doves fall from the trees and blueberries burst into flame. But then again I wasn't the sort to wake my mother in the middle of the night and say I saw an angel and I killed it because it wouldn't tell me where god was. That was him, Ezekiel. Of all names. Mother named him Ezekiel and me she called Elizabeth. Elizabeth Anne, for god's sake, and my brother after a prophet. Mother said he was touched and I said you just wait. Said maybe he'll turn out a preacher and I said maybe he'll wander the desert naked. Mother coddled him all his life on the off chance.

I wasn't right about the desert. Ezekiel in the snow is more surprise to me than all the rest of it. I will never forget when he said and here's his feathers, and by god there were feathers. Mother had no idea where he got them, no one was missing a chicken. Ezekiel in the snow. Me driving to him now because of all the rest of it. Some sort of prophet he is. Some sort of dreams he must be having. Driving past the dead lakes and the geese singing like cursed prima donnas. Ezekiel, come warm your hands with me. Ezekiel, tell me a story. Ezekiel, that was no angel. Now he is blind for everything but dreams. Digging for opals, he said. Called Mother from a pay phone. Opals, my god. And in the snow.

________

"No," said the man in the yellow vest. His beard was white as bloodroot. On the bar, a stack of flea-bitten books, about orchids no less. "Seen no one," he said. Then he patted the pocket of his vest, fingered its yellow velvet flap, and removed a small bundle of bird bones. "Except you and everyone with a front porch." Out of the barroom dark limped a greyhound, one eye half-curdled, the other already spoiled. Her teeth, too, were nowhere near a quorum. But her fur was different, some cousin of mother-of-pearl, almost silver, lilac. "Only dog named in the Bible," he said. She licked from the man's palm with a thin, eloquent tongue, slowly, from what nearly seemed a sense of delicacy, and then disappeared into the dark, to seek from the bones whatever memory of marrow remained. "That makes dogs only one less than the angels." The man removed a jaundiced handkerchief from the opposite pocket to wipe his hands. There was soil in his nails to which he did not attend. His skin was tan as dry tobacco. But he had no beer, only the books. When he leaned close, his breath smelled of wet moss. "What kind of man are you looking for?"

I don't know, I said. I hadn't seen Ezekiel for three years. Some sort of prophet, I said. Who knows why. But I trust a man in a yellow vest to have seen a prophet if there is one to be seen.

________

I went back to my motel, in the style of a Spanish mission: rosy adobe, line of weathered beams. Built by someone who mistook snow for sand, seems to me. Color-blind maybe, or just dreaming of summer. Past the cast-iron gate, bars tipped in lily florets: a gravel courtyard for cars. A yellowed flyer taped to my door claims some circus caravan is on the edge of town, in the pine wood. For who, in February? Hare Krishnas, if they ever drifted this far. Or lumberjacks, by happenstance.

Glazed aqua tiles for the floor. Pitch blue under the bed, the table, the curtains. Potpourri somewhere. Made the whole room reek of honeysuckle. Ezekiel used to clip it from the vine...