Christ’s Passion 
 
 Sure we’re trained to his suffering, sure
the nine-inch nails, and so forth.
 And the cross raised up invoked
 
 the body’s weight so each wound tore,
  and from his abdomen a length of gut 
 dangled down, longing towards earth.
 
 He was a god, after all.
 An eternal light swarmed in his rib cage
 no less strong than the weaving nebulae that haul
 
 this dirt-speck planet through its course.
 Surely his flesh mattered less somehow, less
 than yours to you. He hung against steel rods
 
 with his whole being, and though the pain
 was very pure, he only cried out once.
 All that was writ down. But what if his flesh
 
 felt more than ours, knew each breath
 was a gift, and thus saw
 beyond each instant into all others.
 
 So a morsel of bread conjured up
 the undulating field of wheat from whence it came,
 and the farmer’s back muscles
 
 growing specific under this shirt
 and the sad, resigned pace of the mule
 whose opinion no one sought.
 
 Think of all we don’t see
  in an instant. Cage that in one skull.
 If Christ saw in each
 
 pair of terrified eyes he met
 every creature’s gauzy soul
 then he must have looked down from that bare hill
 
 and watched the tapestry teem
 till that poor carcass he borrowed
 wept tears of real blood before they
 
 unhooked it and oiled it and bound it
 round with linen and hid it under a stone,
 to rise again or not, I can only hope. 
 
 -Mary Karr Viper Rum, Penguin, 1994