Jesus Christ had a potbelly at the Last Supper:
it was, after all, a Roman wine, and he drank, after all,
a hobnobs' helping's worth—

and the bread, always the bread!—a brittle brown loaf
the color of sand or of skin,
and so many things never mentioned:

               not the fresh pears, or fava beans,
not the olive oil spill, not the bone salt,
not the seven spices and
certainly not the fennel—
they never, I say never, paint that wiry root.

Jesus Christ, covered in vinegar, dipping his wedges and shreds,
filling a belly the way a girl fills a birdfeeder:

                                                                                                                                   until it swells.

Cock-crow came and Jesus Christ carried a cross
heavy as seven suitcases, by water’s edge and the edge
of trinity’s park
he lost that sloppy sac—

worked off his father’s feast,
worked away all his mother’s skin
that potbelly gone ghost—never to resurrect:

            they hung only a spangled ivory charm
on that metal hook,
a pious pendant for those wide oak shoulders—

                               and at that day’s dusk,
            taller than palms,
            more crooked than curled,
            in the salmon glow of sundown:
                                                                                                           that pendant pearled.