A Cabinet of Curiosity by Bradford Morrow

Author:Bradford Morrow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Conjunctions
Published: 2018-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

The Fisherman Bombardier of Naval Station Norfolk

A Performance in Four Generations, Three Races, and Too Many Genders to Name

Quintan Ana Wikswo

—For Jean Genet, Aimé Césaire, and Rose LaRose

In this mariner’s damp the lichen sprouts, or rather creeps, in the manner molds and kisses do, prurient. Slightly closer then farther toward and away from their undisclosed destination. Investigating, guarded, but unwilling to cease from exploration.

Sun, perhaps, is for the suicidal ones. And the rotten logs are for the whore molds—whore spores of all kinds, honorable and excoriable, seductive and repulsive, venal and venereal and Venetian, Vesuvian, Venusian, exquisitely fantastic whores—some with scales, some with soft, striped skin, slick.

After all, for centuries the navy ran a red-light ghetto here called the Pussy Stockade, inhabited by many of my ancestors, who were rich until they died, highly venereal. And I owe them something, a stalking, a haunting, along the decaying quay at sunset. I have come here to investigate, in my way, the lichen that I feel slips from my viscera in the darkness. Quays and whores and sailors make fine company as ghosts. All dripping wet, all specters of the slimy sea.

And it was in that way, driven by curiosity, I went walking on the quay at sunset, where good things never happen, depending upon the interpretation of goodness as asset or as liability. I am wearing a preposterous reproduction of a nineteenth-century courtesan corset and a hoop skirt.

There is a why for this, and I shall elaborate.

The sense of the perpendicular rib cage comforts me. When I am walking on the quay at sunset I know that my ribs are encased by other ribs, prone, recumbent, the secretive grave ribs of the Norfolk whores in my family. Supine, and as disquisitive about me, I suspect, as I am about them. But to a questioning bystander I would of course reply that the baroque aristocractic decadence of my corsetry is instead a matter of practicality—they are utilitarian even, because I have slipped on the slimy stairs and fractured my spine, and without the corsets I am instructed to lie on my back—otherwise the ripped tendons and ligaments and tiny slivers of bone would return to the celestial brew of heavy elements and fetid slime, hidden tastefully beneath bruised skin.

Why have bruises become so fascinating in this context? Their near spectral appearance—the surprise one doesn’t expect after impact, yet knew all along was coming. The fifth horsewoman, an Amazon, is the bruise; only one breast, and sharp points in her quiver. Violet, chartreuse, dead blood are the colors of licentiousness and mildew. Erotic in its refusal to comply, yet its malleability. There is the curiosity of what will emerge from a wound that initially leaves no trace. There is the knowledge that a future examination is forthcoming. The flesh remains full and soft, and its darkly nacreous sneer reminds one that as sweet and wounded as it may seem, it will remain until it decides itself to depart. Typically in a follicular haze of mustard, a chlorine gas held tight beneath the skin.

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