Word: afterdeck
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fateful Sunday morning, the Chaplain of a battleship in Pearl Harbor was busy on the afterdeck with a couple of assistants, running up the bunting in preparation for divine service. Their polite murmurs were suddenly interrupted by the roar of the Jap. The Chaplain dropped his bunting, ran to an anti-aircraft gun and began preaching lead to the Japanese. A few minutes later he was heard to intone: "Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition; I just got one of the sons of bitches...
...years later, he painted The Gulf Stream, moving this apprehension from animal to man. A black sailor lies on the afterdeck of a dismasted sloop, adrift and rudderless in the deep Caribbean blue. Enormous sharks circle the boat. Their ominousness is reinforced by the zone of black water from which they rise. (The catalog, rather absurdly, suggests that celibate Homer was invoking that hoary phantom of the Freudian couch, the vagina dentata. This could make sense only to an art historian who has never been near a live shark.) On the horizon, a square-rigger sails indifferently...