Jesus Speaks to the Departing Spirits
Once fleshed, you will forget what the earth is for:
justice and mercy, a place you will need love.
Whatever you’ll think you need, I will give more.
Having forgotten what the earth is for,
you will despair at the flood tide’s height and roar,
but I will surprise you with a returning dove
and sweet remembrance of what the earth is for:
mercy and justice, a place you must give love.
Thomas Eakins, Consummatum est (Philadelphia, 1880)
Eakins had worked all day, so of course he felt crossed
when interrupted at his crucifixion.
Inspired by his old teacher, Bonnat, he had gone
into the Jersey woods to raise a cross;
his student, Wallace, had put on the crown of thorns,
disrobed like a swimmer, backstroked up the Rood.
Hunters blundering in profaned the moment.
He packed up, went back to Philly. The Bloody Tree
rose bloodless on his roof. Wallace re-ascended, the painter
painted, dogs barked, neighbors were indifferent to the cross—
and it is finished. No one buys it. The priests he lends it to
hide it behind a door; the knob pokes a wound, x-shaped,
into his canvas with no pierced side, no flowing blood, no halo
or darkened sky. Who for such a device will live or die?
– A significantly different version was published in Heron Clan Anthology VI (Katherine James Books, 2019) –
J.S. Absher (js-absher-poetry.com) grew up in rural North Carolina and Virginia. He served an LDS mission in France, left the church for many years while most of his family remained active, and is now a committed Latter-day Saint. His first full-length book, Mouth Work, won the 2015 Lena Shull Book Competition sponsored by the North Carolina Poetry Society and was published by St. Andrews University Press. Skating Rough Ground will be published this year by Kelsay Press. Absher’s poems have also appeared in two chapbooks: Night Weather (Cynosura Press, 2010) and The Burial of Anyce Shepherd (Main Street Rag, 2006)—and in 70 journals and anthologies, including BYU Studies Quarterly, Dialogue, North Carolina Literary Review, San Pedro River Review, Sunstone, Tar River Poetry, and Visions International. In 2021, he published two books on southern and North Carolina history. He lives with his wife, Patti, in Raleigh, NC.
About the poem
“Thomas Eakins, Consummatum Est” is from a series of ekphrastic poems exploring suffering in the creation of art—suffering as theme, the suffering of the artists’ models, and the pathos of the artist. “Thomas Eakins” provides a comic variation on this theme. The details of the poem are, for the most part, historically accurate.
