Tear at the thatch, set it on fire! Call the rings of Saturn down through incantation and despair. The sound is grating, a long low wail like that you’d expect of an animal caught in a snare, the intervals between utterance lessening until there is no interval at all but infinite continuation. I attempt to capture the visual equivalent with charcoal on paper bags I carted here from the dump specifically for this purpose, each attempt rounded at the top and exhibiting tendencies to splinter at the edges, just as if I had modeled them on multi-cellular organisms at the dawn of complexity, the very beginning of what we would come to recognize as the blueprint for our own devious make up. Eulalie is striking a bell or a bottle or something solid that rings as if it were hollow, calling to the heavens to witness her grief. There is an enormous gulf between what we see and what we allow ourselves to keep, what we store away in the memory like grains. Trying to break through this habit, to untie it and roll it down the hill, just makes us more susceptible and creates, in the end, the distinct feeling that we have accomplished nothing whatsoever. We have simply been standing in place before a mirror and gazing at the odd, isolated strands of hair that jut out from the temple, that catch whatever draft is in the room and amplify it. Mimic it the way the waves mimic the beach on which they will shortly be extinguishing themselves. For my part, I never realized that others thought it possible to make yourself somehow less than human by studying navigation, by sharpening quills when you have a typewriter at hand. It was balmy times, but venomous, the actual sun so far away as to seem like failed conjecture, a promise made on two hands, only one of which, though, was lacerated purposefully to produce the blood necessary for the ritual. Now the bugle is packed up tight and Eulalie throws every other object she comes across through what would have been a window in previous decades or millennia but is now simply an orifice, a blank place in a wall that has crumbled some in the rain and which you might want to write poems about if you were in the habit of writing poems. If you were encouraged in your youth by those who didn’t understand the potentially devastating consequences of what it was they were fobbing off on you. The nights spent picking scabs on your arms. The prizes with names that make one think of prairie flowers, of dens full of buzzing rattlesnakes.