Tristan Robert Lange

The Dastardly Dell of Death

The dull, dark geen-gray fingernail presses down on cold linen,

Attached to a rigid, outstretched middle digit locked in its rigidity,

As if the blackened hand is silently sending a signal of solidarity

With the dead,

A final act of defiance set in rigor mortis motion

Against a world hellbent on death.

Were we meant to atrophy in defiance of death?

In a dark, shadowed, sunken socket, the pale of the eye

Is a slim fingernail clipping, vacant of life or connection,

The brown iris rolled up and away underneath half-moon lids.

Eybrow evinces ending resignation over a green-pallored brow,

A cliff from which the only remaining growth flows down upon the pall.

The necrotic nose an aquline mountain peak, a secluded summit

Ascending over the soul’s enigmatic exit, opened—

Extinguished—

Now an abyss into a bodily display of death’s dominance.

The hair-clad chin, a wall of obscurity from death’s design.

Sloping down to the nape,

Stiff shoulders segregate the neck from the depressed chest,

The pale gray expanse ascending up to the ribs before

Descending to the torso’s total and terrible extended terrain,

The navel a canyon wound

Reminiscent of the love and nurturing that gave birth

To the now, macabre, mutilated and motionless

Man.

The putrified-pallor of the board-like body, boarded up

Within a wood frame; he lies on a palled slab of stone,

Lacking life’s hue—except the vulva-visaged wounds,

Where human cruelty met helpless human flesh—

The mysteriously murdered man suddenly becomes familiar,

His murder no mystery at all.

For here, lying on this appalling pall, on a stone slab,

Framed within a tomb

The Christ

Though worshipped as

God,

A dead man stiff as if artificially aborted from the womb

By a species dying to mercilessly mangle its own,

This boxed tomb a king’s throne,

Rotting flesh over bruised bone while lying stiff—alone—

A bed fit for a mocked king.

Who will join in on this kind of hymn

Devoid of the pomp and pomposity that Easter brings,

Where one must face the cold, stark

Truth

In the chasm of a rock-hewn tomb?

Not even God could avoid the dastardly dell of death.