A Virtue of Attachment

The malaise makes Eulalie cross when Squid tries to describe it. Not that he tries very

hard. The hounds in the kennel fire off their response when the evening gets cold. He

thinks she is, in all actuality, somewhere else. Walking past a fountain. Telephone poles.

Squid surmises she will thrive there. With saxophone players. Their epic games of dice.

We picture what reminds us of ourselves even when we are trying to escape the self.

Trying to unhook it and let the current take it where it will. The reasons for this are

obvious. Cigars with their unrelenting aromas. The grottoes constructed primarily of

concrete. Decorated later, as an afterthought. With colored gauze hanging from the

ceiling. Chess sets in the corners. You could spend a day and a half in there and no one

would know you were missing. In fact, the day itself would begin to lose it shape. Its

identity. It would no longer correspond to any normal or identifiable expanse of time.

Squid thinks this the sort of thing Eulalie has been hashing out in her mind. He intends
to deprive her of the pleasure she might otherwise gain from its realization. By pretending

to look at his watch. By ladling out the lukewarm contents in the tureen. I know there
are vicious items in the catalogue. Objects that run down their antecedents. Deliberately

destroy them. But where is it written we must honor our parents? How do we undo
five thousand years of civilization without causing distress or inconvenience? Eulalie holds

the spoon in her hand for thirty minutes. Half a day. Nothing happens. She isn’t struck

down by lightning. She isn’t rent by the wild beasts of the forest. She is simply made the

lovelier by the association. By osmosis, I suppose. Still, Squid doubts skin can ever really

be altered. Can be distracted from its original mission. Which was to discover those

things that are sharp, that are uncomfortably warm. And then steer the organism
in the opposite direction.

Agricultural Metaphors are Common in Sexual Contexts

Squid thinks Eulalie is making up the bit about the sleeping potion. Wanting to re-arrange

the furniture in the basement. In fact, there is no furniture in the basement. At least none

he can remember. Still, his memory has been a bit sketchy lately. It takes its cue from the

sky. The sky is so full of holes, almost anything can get through. An army is camped out

on the ridge behind our house. You can hear them playing pinochle. It’s obvious they

don’t know how to lose with grace. Sometimes it takes a catastrophe of this sort to turn us

into better people. Usually it has the opposite effect. When we examine the
photograph afterward, there is a line, barely discernible, over someone’s shoulder.
Like a javelin caught just before the moment of impact.

Three Incorrect Steps

Squid finds the shameless self-denial troubling. It goes counter to everything Eulalie

professed when he first met her. When the lights were on thanks solely to the generators.

The glow they produced seemed somehow otherworldly. As if it had traveled ten times

around the globe to get there. And it was so wan and exhausted at the exertion, it seemed

ready to fall over at any moment. Eulalie thinks Squid’s reveries, his inordinate fondness

for things in the past, a weakness. The same way knowing too many people is a

weakness. It diverts your attention from where it ought to be. On the conversation at

hand. The sniffing about obliquely. Why we tend to see bipedal apes whenever we

venture into the forest. Why we insist such things could never actually exist once
we are ensconced again in the Mexican restaurants. The discount tire shops we
frequent duringthe day.

Analogue of the Molecule

I imagine Eulalie doesn’t want Squid to undo what he has already accomplished. But she

does expect elegance. A certain way of dressing. Speaking to the concierge. Assuming, of

course, one can be rustled up at the last minute. The sounds of afternoon traffic are

sufficient to get him in the mood to touch her. Even the sound of nothing happening at all

will suffice. Sound itself is the problem. If only we could harness it the way we harness

mules when it’s time to bring the sugarcane to market. We’d know where to begin. We’d

have the quarry laid out on a table. And have merely, then, to pick it apart -- turn it over

and stick in the pins -- to mark out where one portion begins. And another one ends.

Where the names of things suffice. And where they become a burden.

Charles Freeland lives in Dayton, Ohio. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Through the Funeral Mountains on a Burro (forthcoming from Otoliths) and Grubb (BlazeVOX books), as well as several chapbooks, including Eulalie & Squid (forthcoming from Chippens Press), Furiant, Not Polka (Moria), and The Case of the Danish King Halfdene (Mudlark). His website is The Fossil Record and his blog is Spring Cleaning in the Labyrinth of the Continuum.

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