Never changes: cached 
in the wallets of conventioneers
or soaked in the red bubbles
of a soldier’s pocket, he poses
in heaven as he poses out back 
by the engine parts and halfway
up the washroom mirror 
of a Smoky Mountain Texaco.

His astonishment is shy 
as a dove in the hands 
 of a brute. He is a bride
 in her underwear 
hearing the truth
for the first time.
He indulges our Christendom
like a beautiful med student
witnessing a variety show
performed by wolf men. 
His eyes seem to say,
That too? Well, okay.

The aura of Warner Sallman’s Jesus 
is pale as frozen butter.
It is that nightlight in the distance
glossing the floorboards of a Teutonic hallway. 
Its mournful persistence is born of antique vanities
and whelms the dark with a fragrance
of cold cream and wallpaper glue.

I’ve seen Warner Sallman’s Jesus running
Ferris Wheels in Texas. All night long 
he takes tickets and delivers the happy screams, 
his hair gathered in a pony-tail, his sleeves fallen 
to show skin lapped white as milk,
pasteurized, homogenized, without tattoos. 
His lust can never touch him.
Tangled in a hedge around his heart,
it stirs the briars, pricks the flirts. 
Women test the thorns and say tisk-tisk. 
Men say, What up, Little Jesus? Where can I get some? 
No one seems to know
it’s Him. 

I’ve watched Warner Sallman’s Jesus 
fly an F16 over the hell-named hills
of our diamond deserts. On aircraft 
carriers I’ve seen him touch our ordinance 
while gazing wistfully to sea. Under stars,
back striped, he wanders alone above leviathan
scattering breadcrumbs on the swells. 

Outside our empire, I’ve seen him, 
his staff planted in hills of lemon grass, 
eyes closed to breezes gentling  
through the tin-roofed missions 
where women in rags hack sugar cane; 
he stands near them, 
his back to them, 
and always looks 
this way.

I’ve seen Warner Sallman’s Jesus ripped
from the stronghold of megachurches
and loosed in the wilderness of truths.
I’ve seen him pilloried in lecture halls 
and parodied in the galleries. In wayward verse
he leaves behind the jumbotron to kiss the mother 
serpent trapped beneath the virgin’s foot. 

Warner Sallman’s Jesus is the Pantocrator 
of our anachronisms. He arrives in time
just as we picture him. 

Yet, when my heart forebears
and inclines to unsettle
my perspective, I sometimes see,
in America’s most amenable Son of Man,
the salvation we so strenuously  
refuse. It is as if Warner Sallman
’s Jesus, in a moment of church basement 
weariness, in the after-hour glow
of exit lights, cannot stop hearing 
faraway negro spirituals 
rising from the mud
of Delta sunsets.


Note on the poem: "The Head of Christ," by Warner Sallman (USA) 1940. This is probably the most widely distributed image of Christ in the United States, if not world; according to Wikipedia, it had been reproduced over half a billion times worldwide by the end of the 20th century.

Originally published in  The Ekphrastic Review | September 27, 2025