I: La Bête Humaine
The older gods
Had endless powers
Divorced from prayer
And solid flesh,
Publicly haunting
Endless hours
From poised and precious
Altitude.
But all alone
This Christ desires
A physical
And private pain
That is our own:
Thus he requires
New faith in bloody
Solitude.
Now Pilate, with
Great savoir faire,
Delivers Christ
Into our hands.
Such intimacy
This God demands.
It is His human
Attitude.
Jesus is condemned to death
❦
II: Division of Labor
Christ finds a spider
And prays His cross
Will be intricate
As the spider’s web:
In the delicate weave
He insinuates grace,
Imagining heaven
Heavy with lace,
Intricate as
The spider’s web.
Christ covets
Arachne’s curse,
To rehearse forever
Instinctive tasks
Far from redemption’s
Unique indenture,
Serving the pleasure
Of extinct gods
Whose commands are all
A spider asks.
In laborious glory,
This Christ descends
To shoulder the story
Of the living god.
Distending eros
Across His back,
He essays heaven,
Bones in a sack,
Dreaming of spiders,
Their works and days.
Jesus takes up His cross
❦
III: Physics
Untried muscles
Across Christ’s back
Deny His mind
Its reverie
Compelling His being,
Its bodily force,
Toward the rugged embrace
Of Calvary.
Surprised to have fallen,
Heaven to earth,
Christ makes no effort
To arise
But considers His birth,
Its gravity,
Two worlds attracted
To one demise.
Jesus falls the first time
❦
IV: Hoc Est Enim Corpus Meum
O what a child
Time conceives,
Miracle of
Effect and cause,
Steeped in a love
Heaven cleaves,
Not reconciled
To physical laws.
Still, the magnet
Of maternal care
Corrects the sure
Pragmatic path
Toward crucified
Eternity. (To
Roost in the meshes
Of an instant’ s womb
Christ interrupts
His destiny:
Thus flesh corrupts
With sympathy.)
Christ feels a wan,
Condign despair
Caress God’s plan
With human limb;
The imagination
Bodies share
Impress on Him
The ways of man.
Jesus meets His afflicted mother
❦
V: Chance
A stranger steps in
To pick up the story,
Impressed into service
By circumstance
When Christ lurches into
A private dance,
Avoiding each crevice
In His blesséd path.
What god isn’t lucky,
Simon scoffs, as he’s
Handed the hard,
Right-angled load;
Christ tiptoes, weightless,
Up the road,
Crossing His fingers
Against His stars.
Simon the Cyrenian helps Jesus carry His cross
❦
VI: Memory
Evolution’s outline —
The skeleton of toil —
Is traced by Veronica
From His passing face,
Etching experience
And its chronic waste
Into the fabric
Of memory.
Weeping, the woman
Promises to keep
The soiled remnant
Of their bloody kiss.
Christ lauds her loyalty
And wonders if
Sweat spoils relics
Like it tries the heart.
Veronica wipes the face of Jesus
❦
VII: Traffic
Should a god
Not fall upward?
Christ asks Himself
As He interrupts
The business
Of the ants,
Lumbering toward
The insect world.
Carry many times
Their weight,
The ants continue
With their tasks:
Learnéd in the means
Of chance
They gather meat
For long winters.
Lingering
On hands and knees
Christ admires
The earth-bound creatures;
Ear to the ground
He hears a voice whisper
Watch their ways
And get wisdom.
Jesus falls the second time
❦
VIII: Incarnation
A warning child,
This uttering Christ
Silences mothers
With His mourning tongue,
A mortal language
Affixed to flesh,
Eye gripping eye,
Limb licking limb,
Heart stopping mouth
With life’s bloody sigh.
Jesus speaks to the women of Jerusalem
❦
IX: Prayer
A third time falling
Christ charms the day
And hovers a moment
In divine mid-air;
He covets the easy
Play of flight,
The faith of the gay
And wordless birds.
A third time falling,
Christ floats away
But loses His balance
In freedom;
He crashes to Calvary
And hugs the clay,
On the knees of the gods
He lies bleeding.
Jesus falls the third time
❦
X: Introspection
Stripped of His garments,
Christ loses face,
Embarrassed by the crimson sores
Which open outward
To dress His fate
With the jewels and excrement
The flesh contains.
Into His body Christ retreats
To view His bruises inside out
And wander the distances
That house desire;
He broods down
Every bloody alley
The inner life demands.
The skeleton beneath His skin,
Quiet as a holy ghost,
Invokes the anguish
Of buried bones
Remembering forgotten dead:
This is our body,
How it haunts the soul.
Jesus is stripped of His garments
❦
XI: The Night Sky
Fixed on the cross,
Christ prays for night
And pictures Himself
A constellation,
Marking time
Through endless tides
Set in the rhyme
And gaze of heaven.
He shuts His eyes:
Three points of light
Define in darkness
His body’s pain,
Figured in
The drift of stars
But left alone
In earth’s demesne.
Jesus is nailed to the cross
❦
XII: The Seasons
Christ marks a calendar
Upon His back
And numbers it
With common weals
Forsaking the powers
The sky reveals
To score time in
His blood and flesh.
Celestial hours
Determinedly mesh,
Turning eternity
Through night and day;
Their heavenly light
Christ throws away
To observe the solstice
Of the staggering heart,
Whose erratic seasons
Stop and start,
Told not by stars
But by sorrows.
Jesus dies on the cross
❦
XIII: Vespers
The hours seeping
From Christ’s wounds
Taunt His disciples
With work to do;
In fear they free
The haunted weight
That tumbles through
Their trembling hands;
With ritual
They shut His eyes
And kiss to bless
His breathless lips;
A wind from dead
To living slips,
Through the dim joints
Of twilight, weeping.
Jesus is taken down from the cross
❦
XIV: Sleep and Wake
The impatient body,
Perfumed with life,
Imagines glory
But is made to wait,
Uncertain in
Its certain tomb.
Beneath death’s stone
Dreams concentrate;
Far underworld
The soul is borne,
Worrying every
Inhumed bone.
Christ is restless
To rehearse His fate,
But the shadows looming
At the ivory gate
Obscure His passage
Through the gate of horn.
Jesus is placed in the sepulchre