JESUS IN CATALONIA

Small slender thumbtacks

fix his image to a white run of wall

whiter than Mary’s thoughts

imprinted with the greys of her son’s grey shadow.

A hundred Marys weep in the museums.

You can’t of course see the thumbtacks

for that white wall’s no mountain 

from those dry and barren days. 

Someone coughs on Golgotha,

someone drives by,

their dust swirling the mountain 

and its streak of sky 

off the flaking fresco.

The wall where nothing lasts

cannot pick out

his grey shadow, ripe for any cross, 

his form cut from a tree

by tenth-century hands.

His arms make three sections 

just like his body,

its fingers and toes 

grown longer than our own,

as if to close us in,

as if they’d snatched at some infinite spiral,

his nails just grazing its end.