GOLDEN AGE
“Antiquity held too light thoughts from objects of mortality, while some drew provocations of mirth from anatomies, and jugglers showed tricks with skeletons; when fiddlers made not so pleasant mirth as fencers, and men could sit with quiet stomachs, while hanging was played before them.”
—Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia
Floggings, stonings, stocks, and racks constitute our daily entertainments; witches burn; thieves hang; heretics are screwed tighter into their Judas chairs and murderers beheaded. Écorchés in anatomy books, hipshot and leering, hold up the fabric of their own flayed skins. Our engravings, paintings, and other crafts likewise cram with cracked skulls and moldered books, an astrolabe or hourglass. Desiccated fruit; meat-slabs draped from butcher’s hooks; guttering candles; mandolins with missing frets. Ruins, shadows, cobwebs, mirrors, medicaments. Fresh corpses heap in trundling plague-carts—and even those still expiring with some faint breath get lumped helter-skelter in great stinking carcass pits. Plague masks confused for some saucepot’s Venetian domino at Carnevale. Riots, lust, revenge. Cesspools of offal, vomit, horse droppings trickle through thoroughfares as wenches empty chamber-pots out windows. Orange-sellers and cutpurses circulate our tragedies. Tumblers and zanies, fire-eaters, bone-jugglers, and chin-players perform during entr’actes. Puddles of blood scab over black as an old spittoon brimming with pine-tar from so many backstreet duels; dogfights; bear-baitings. Linkboys will gladly light you down blind alleys to lice-ridden Molls or Molly houses. Apothecaries prescribe salamander wool, henbane, and mercury. Ladies take to powder and patchboxes; gentlemen to their potations. We train up war dogs and mercenary sailors. Scholars retreat to quibble about classical errata or rhubarb the grammar on an entablature from a dead language. Marshalling the fulsome wit of human reason, preachers of every persuasion commend this life to the obliquity of despair—as good for nothing except to purge us of all earthly dross by means of philosophizing on our coming doom, whereof even their noisome antic is but a mummer’s dance kicking up old dust. But no, we have no gladiators, no crucifixions, no human sacrifices, no cannibals, no savage rites, no Turkish harems, no acupuncture, no worship of animals, no head-shrinking, no—none of that.
Mr. Figure Vows to Start a Diet
Victorian ladies once ate tapeworms. Analogously, Mr. Figure imagines himself a dark-eyed, death-haunted Ophelia, swallowing slimy earthworms and pullulating maggots, salamanders, and nematodes — not after drowning in a lake, but rather as a walking cure over the course of several years so as to decay and molder from the inside out. Transform himself into a hunger artist, a living skeleton, a spectacle of freakish self-discipline. Starve himself of worldly splendor in an askesis of bodily negation. The self no more than an epigraph, a glyph. Absent of balderdash and ballyhoo, no part amorphous, a rib-racked matrix of containment and control, signifying nothing. Well. Not quite right now, though — tomorrow and tomorrow. Mr. Figure wobbles around, from one paper-thin fantasy to another, without any definite shape.
Will Cordeiro has work published in AGNI, Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, The Offing, The Threepenny Review, THRUSH Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Will’s collection Trap Street won the 2019 Able Muse Book Award. Will is also co-author (with Lawrence Lenhart) of Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology forthcoming from Bloomsbury. Will co-edits Eggtooth Editions and teaches in the Honors College at Northern Arizona University.