Words in an Antique Dictionary

Behind the sheer facade with its gilded lettering, these prisoners are confined in alphabetical order in vast yellowing rooms, row upon row, sardel upon sardine. They are clothed identically all in black, their feet bound tightly with serifs. They breathe musty air and dream of their places of origin.

Each tier of cells has the homey touch of an illustration, often some exotic animal — eland, gnu, or musk ox, or an architectural nicety—hogan or oriel. The guards compete to watch block F, wherein reside fellatio, fornication, frottage. Block W, by contrast, contains want and wistfulness, along with wish.

All of the inmates, these many thousands of them, hope to be of service to the world. They yearn for mere acceptance, to be allowed to perform mundane tasks, to fulfill their existences with meaning. Nothing more.

Plunge

The rotten ice of April or the virginal ice of December, through which snowmobilers plunge, their bodies to be recovered that night or next spring: whatever. Plunge is the impartial agent of water.

Plunge is the cliché of bus accidents in the gorges of this world, the shiny long-voweled cataract to death.

A couple together in bed: plunge. Plunge brings the sentence to climax. Its sound stimulates the lips and teeth and tongue, tickles the flesh of the palate and the receptive organs. Oh plunge: ill-used protagonist of erotica, considerate but excited French lover.

Quivering springboard of fortune: plunge. Marry; invest all of your money in high-tech stocks; despair and drive your car to the state park, hike to the precipice that overlooks the river, climb to the top and plunge.

Snowy Afternoon

Dandruff commercials were to haunt our lad until his first sexual encounter with a licensed phrenologist.

On the right side of his head, he used a non-medicated shampoo; but into the left side of his scalp he massaged a pine-tar solution infused with the spoor of Walt Whitman. Lather rose, bubbles popped. He smelled an essence of clear-cut national forest. A freshet teeming with comradely, slick-bellied trout overran the banks of his medulla oblongata: o, the sheer chemistry of it all!

Our lad rinsed his hair in rainwater. He took a salmon-colored towel and wrapped it around his head. He daydreamed of young Walt in Brooklyn, supine upon the marble slab of the Turkish bath, the attendant's hand hot upon his abdomen, a fulsome mountain rising above the calamus prairies of Kansas Territory.