A Cabinet of Curiosity

by Bradford Morrow

  I still worry that Delfina is hurt, however, so I tell her not to listen. “Louisa has all sorts of goofy ideas. I’ve been walking the path through the woods for months, but when I first got here she made it seem like some sort of death trap.”

  “That’s probably because those woods are full of illegals,” says Eduardo.

  Met by my blank stare, he continues, “You know, immigrants. The ones who can’t make rent, so they go live in the woods.”

  “You mean they’re out there now?”

  “They are every summer. Of course, when the weather gets bad, they’ll have to go—to one of the shelters, back to Guatemala, or they’ll freeze to death. You haven’t been here for a winter yet, have you, Cemetery Lady? It’s not good.”

  I report Eduardo’s comments to Owen that night. My therapist has deemed it safe for me to cook under supervision, and Owen watches as I slice onions and barrage him with questions simultaneously. Does he think that the wood-carver is an immigrant living in the forest? Could it be someone I’ve seen around the village, a parishioner at the church, one of our volunteers? Is he one of the young men who wait beside the train station early each morning, hoping to be picked up for a day’s labor by a landscaping truck?

  “Maybe we should leave a note,” I say. “Eduardo could help me write it in Spanish.”

  “And say what? Are you an immigrant?”

  “It’s getting cold, Owen. What is he—or she—going to do then?”

  “I don’t know, El. Eduardo said there are shelters. Do you want to ask him to move in with us?”

  In a burst of frustration, I drop the knife into the sink. The satisfying clang it makes serves to camouflage the noisiness of the silence between us, in which the stubborn reality is reverberating: I don’t know what to do any more than you do.

  Over the next weeks, I become strategic in my offerings. I leave another scarf, then a hat, then a sweater that I knitted in several marathon sessions. Not knowing the size or gender of the recipient, I err on the side of large and boxy. The carver responds with a Canada goose, a coyote, and a fox—all animals that migrate for the winter.

  One morning when I wake up, the air has turned over, revealing its cool underbelly. The panes of our bedroom window are cobwebbed with frost. Looking through them to the garden, I see that the tops of the gravestones—all fifteen, standing in neat rows—are capped by thin crescents of snow.

  My notes on the families of the Catholic cemetery sit in a drawer of the desk in the guest room, untouched for nearly a month. In their place are fat sheaves of new papers—newspaper clippings and illustrations and broadsides documenting the factories and businesses of nineteenth-century Tattersall.

  Since the historical society suspended its meetings for the season, my visits to the forest have become more sporadic. As I lace up my duck boots, I realize that it has been over a month since I last exchanged offerings. The hat and scarf that I slip on are exact replicas of the ones I knitted for the wood-carver. Whenever I leave the house, I scour the streets for the sight of a person wearing them, without success.

  I head out the door, past Washington’s Rock and the rubble of Akin’s mill, luminous beneath its shawl of snow. When I reach the tree, a chilled vacancy is hanging in the air, as though the substance of every molecule has just been flushed clean.

  I crouch next to the hollow, and that’s when I see them: all of the offerings that I have made, from the pile of lenses to the pair of gloves that I deposited last month, in neat piles like presents on Christmas morning. The only things missing are the tomatoes; the empty boxes sit in their place.

  The angel is still there. Frost has set into the grooves and along the edges of the wood, piped in thin lines like white icing. Placed into the cleft of a branch just below it is a wooden otter, its small paws curled inward, its long body arched to form a loop.

  I take the otter in my hand, then jump to my feet so quickly that I dip into orthostasis. A swarm of white stars momentarily blanches my vision, then disperses in a million different directions. My gaze tracks them frantically, as though in the buzzing movement of a single gleaming speck I might catch a glimpse of the wood-carver, scurrying out of sight. I rotate on my heels once, twice, spinning on a tilted axis on the frozen ground. Then I spring from the path and take off into the heart of the forest. I walk for an hour, pacing the bed of leaves that have grown hard and unyielding in the cold, until my hands are numbed and my coat sleeve is stiffened with the continuous trail of slime I have been wiping from my nose. Fortunately, the forest is small, bracketed by the village on all sides. When I come to one end, I stumble out onto the street beside the hospital. Charting a perpendicular path, I race through until I emerge at the grocery store parking lot.

  As I cut a series of straight lines, dissecting the forest systematically, I discover many things: a baby’s shoe, with a rubber sole and plaid canvas upper; dozens of scattered empty beer bottles and cans; a blue tarp, a small yellow bucket, a green watering can; countless golf balls (where is the golf course?); a rusted hammer; a broken flowerpot; an eviscerated mattress, spilling its guts of ragged stuffing and tangled springs; a syringe half filled with brown syrup; and bricks—bricks in piles and mounds, bricks stacked into pyramids and cairns, pouring out of the gnarled sockets of upturned trees, and tumbling into the river where they form makeshift paths and serendipitous dams; bricks pulverized into a fine dust that swells with the provocation of my footsteps and lingers in the air, tracing my path through the forest in long cords of lowly hovering red clouds.

  These artifacts are distributed widely; there is no discernible pattern to them, nothing that gives the impression of a discrete living area, although there are several spots that I ineffectively craft into camps in my mind, looking for comfortable places on which to lay my head, choosing hideaways in which to store my precious belongings, and calculating convenient proximities to the stream. I even discover a brace of boulders, shaped into a shelf with a shady alcove beneath, which I envision as one of the Leatherman’s rock shelters—but aside from a shallow crust of old leaves and a few brushwood tumbleweeds, it’s empty.

  If there was nothing there—absolutely nothing—I might feel a sense of closure. In the seemingly random, meaningless scatter of things, which hint but do not reveal, there is a tantalizing openness, a portal that refuses to be shut. In my mind I am still searching for a coherent thread with which to lace together the discordant bits of evidence, sifting through faces on the street, as though I might bring the pieces together with Sherlockian precision, and know all there is to know. But the truth is that I know even less about the carver than I do about Alexander Rooney. Both exist on a plane of existence that is separate, yet parallel, to mine. Some remote cosmic spasm jogged us into alignment, then just as quickly wrenched us apart again. Now where I look for them there is an absence like an empty tomb. Like a gravestone without a body. A shoe without a foot. A million lenses scattered and glittering on the forest floor, a galaxy of glass stars, fading into the dark.

  Three Poems

  Bin Ramke

  ASBESTOS AND ITS CURIOUS DANGER

  In the Middle Ages, supposed to be salamanders’ wool; another old name for it in English was fossil linen (18c.). Prester John, the emperor of India, and Pope Alexander III were said to have had robes or tunics made of it.

  —Etymonline.com

  An amorous mixture

  of exotic and ordinary, a rock

  woven fibrous into

  potholders and flame-proof suits.

  An act of touch—the dare of curiosity—

  the sense of touch or taste or tenderness

  of the infant informed foretold

  mortal memory noli me tangere

  momentary sense, tense

  in its eager return-wish, hand to flame

  to return to earth a sacrifice

  (burning to know, o curious care)

  of desire versus not-desire

  contentment contained:

  pl
easure is a staleness like virtue

  not virtue as strength but virtue

  versus, curious about the flame’s

  affection flesh we felt

  the world bare

  and drink minerals of an evening

  when tendrils tend to rise

  from the surface, breathable,

  picturesque, then gone, vaporish

  like fire a song sold.

  Having researched the kindling temperature

  of flammables, we devised a test of nerve

  as children one poured lighter

  fluid in his palm, the other

  set it aflame it might not hurt

  then again it might.

  THE LIKE OF LOOKS LIKE

  1.

  While I mourned at her bedside

  I also wanted to know

  what it was to die—not was like,

  but was. I needed to document.

  What I like, taking pictures

  I cringe when I think of pain

  When I feel pain I feel pain

  That morning the mountains felt close

  The clouds floating

  The twelve-spotted skimmer floating

  A tinkling stream weedy out the window

  Color causes pain in time

  Like was an adjective, “be pleasant”

  To take a picture is violence

  Theft is property

  I own my own thieving

  which was a camera flash her face …

  2.

  From the imagery of curious Lucretius on the nature of things:

  Light like oxen: the sun’s light and his heat, because they are made of minute elements, which are as it were beaten with knocks, and do not hesitate to pass through the intervening air when struck by the blow of that which follows; for instantly light comes up behind light, and flash is pricked on by flash, as in a long team … 4:186–190

  Or: since a shape handled in the dark is known to be the same as that seen in clear light by day, it must be that touch and sight are moved by a like cause. 4:230–233

  Or, the face I touched was touched by light,

  I could see and know and mourn.

  3.

  A child who learns to touch with

  a braille-like confidence in what is there

  and what is not lies against death

  between waking and dreaming

  when the very blankets warmed

  by the child’s body are so like

  a mother, equilibrium of

  temperature, temperament,

  that the whole world touchingly

  conspires rhythmically like a lung.

  4.

  I like to take pictures with telephones.

  Like a camera a machine to keep

  a voice or any sound within a room

  within which secrets adhere to walls

  like mildew after a flood, coloring

  the future which is a memory,

  a likely memory of catastrophe.

  5.

  It looks like rain, my mother said,

  and it did.

  6.

  How her breath sounded:

  Kussmaul, Cheyne-Stokes

  Biot’s respiration, ataxic

  agonal

  like sounds like

  in the end.

  I did take her picture, digital death mask

  like Proust’s like Napoleon’s

  like Mary, Queen of Scots’s

  like DanteBlakeKeats’s like alike.

  7.

  But to draw close to a death

  is not to know—unless to one’s

  own death, not even a mother’s.

  I know no more now

  than then; curiously less.

  WHY WE LIVE WHERE WE LIVE

  Plots of these stars’ velocities have swoops, arches, and spirals indicating patches of stars that are moving together. If the Milky Way were in equilibrium, and hadn’t been recently perturbed, those patterns wouldn’t appear. That they do indicates that something has shaken up the stars recently enough that their orbits haven’t relaxed back to a stable state yet.

  —Leah Crane, New Scientist, April 30, 2018

  A small dog eats grass then runs

  for no clear reason but to an observer

  with a will and with intent.

  Observers want to know, cannot

  accept the mere, the more or less

  unreasoned romp; die of curiosity, we say.

  Hers is a philosophy of dirt, and of perturbation,

  and she is given a name which is odd.

  “Pet” is an English word of unknown origin.

  I have watched animals under the sun

  and under starlight they are not the same.

  *

  At night she sleeps and dreams

  but offers no hint (a word related to hunt

  which indicates a pack of hounds).

  To understand movement one

  must be still for long.

  We would know the difference

  but we cannot find the boundary,

  unlike dogs at the fence

  separating themselves like gravel at a sieve,

  big ones left behind barking,

  small ones slipping through spaces …

  the boundary is never where we are looking

  but is often where we are standing, hopeless.

  *

  Did only primates develop an astronomy?

  We know of dung beetles’ use of the stars,

  which counts. We know of birds

  whose children make initial flights

  thousands of miles from home

  with no instruction but knowing

  the shapes stars make when viewed

  from here. That counts. Observers

  are curious to know. Which

  else among the denizens

  of this ground we walk on makes a science

  of starlight? When William Herschel

  sat in the dark garden looking

  through the lenses he himself

  had ground, his sister sat

  at her desk at a far window noting

  his messages sent by string—one sharp

  pull meant angle of declination,

  two quick meant …

  one long pull meant …

  this to protect his eyes from the light

  of her lamp. She took his notes.

  She was so small

  and full of her own science.

  Her eyes could have filled

  with her own comets.

  Teardrop-shape.

  The following three reasons motivated the representation of a soil profile: to explain the resurrection of the dead, to display the roots, and to show ploughing.

  —Encyclopedia of Soil Science, “Soil in Art”

  From within comes a living layer

  maybe like a dream, sandy, damp

  and dangerous. My little dog knows,

  while digging, me. Admire

  in a cave in France paint made of earth

  on rock walls—they made a copy

  nearby and many humans look.

  I like “to display the roots.” Dis-

  play. Deploy. Bring to light. Bright

  engagement of the tubular tangle …

  plicare, pleat, unpleat, explicate,

  explicit. But one could have reached

  manually into the dirt to trace

  roots from the plant into the scatter.

  Oh, and I read that trees at night

  might breathe, very slowly but

  measurably; not breathe but draw

  fluid upward, a kind of contraction

  of the cambium. An exchange process

  in the dark. My little dog

  dug there, in starlight,

  mole-like, happy. I watch her incuriosity

  as a release, a respite.

  What the artist made: molecularly

  whittled seismic soil ve
xed concavities.

  The manner in which we sense the world remains forever incomplete and ambiguous because we always experience things from a particular point of view or relationship. The body is open to the world but things are always hidden from it.

  —Christopher Tilley, The Materiality of Stone

  Desperate for air pushed

  by wind breath between breaths

  hazarding a life with remaining years

  he aged as best he could, less

  disguising himself as himself he walked

  along the paths trying to place

  one foot half on the paving half

  on the grass or sandy edge

  for no reason except focus

  having recently learned of leaf

  beetles who disguise themselves

  as the bite marks they make

  he tried to, not to, tried

  to leave no trace intractable

  in passivity. He knew his place.

  He had no place, which he knew

  as honorable. The wind moved

  his accumulations

  cloud-like

  before his feet dust risen

  rising even as the sole slid

  along the edge. There is

  no edge there is only

  change, another word for age.

  No one watched. I find this

  curious, how many aged men

  go unwatched in the world,

  go and live and linger

  and no one watching wonders why.

  The seasons change as they will

  we have changed them unwitting

  it is warm now when once was

  cold is a place of small creatures

  no song where once birds sang.

  We watched a sheet of plastic

  the color of watched wind

  roll down a street into cylindrical

  fabric-like lacy light shifting

  against pavement like handling

  beauty arisen from foam

  as foam or wave as

  particle persistent rhythmic

  as force of wind unwinding.