CHILEAN

SEA BASS IS

REALLY JUST PATAGONIAN

TOOTHFISH

Charles Freeland

2

Chilean Sea Bass is

Really Just

Patagonian Toothfish

Charles Freeland

Differentia Press

Santa Maria, CA

3

Chilean Sea Bass is Really Just

Patagonian Toothfish

Charles Freeland

Copyright © 2010

All Rights Reserved.

Published by Differentia Press

Book Design by Felino A. Soriano

Cover Art, courtesy of Duane Locke

Except for the sole purpose for use in reviews, no

portion of this book may be reproduced in any form,

without the written permission from the publisher or

author.

Differentia Press

Santa Maria, CA 93458

Differentia Press Poetic Collections of the │Experimental Spectrum│

differentiapress.com

4

5

Portions of this work first appeared in Otoliths and

Counterexample Poetics.

6

For Lisa Mahle-Grisez

7

Chilean Sea Bass is

Really Just

Patagonian Toothfish

8

9

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,

then, 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. Is this

mean-spirited? Sure, but when have we accepted

anything less? How often are the pantomimes

transcended by juveniles asking all the wrong

questions? Getting up from their seats and

circulating about the room? They know something

we don’t. The value of the atmosphere. The word

play that gets the wisdom teeth aching thirty years

10

and more after they’ve been removed. They serve as

concrete stand-ins for the larger concept and as such

ought to be commended. Ought to be given a day on

the calendar. But there are always objections. And

when we list these on a piece of paper, it takes

twenty-five minutes just to get through those that

start with the letter V. The drums suggest something

we haven’t been able to formulate. The sound drops

from the clouds like locusts, and seizes up. It

becomes something you point at with your fingers.

Something you taste on the tongue. The sun follows

us through the fields, along the shortcut that occurs

to us spontaneously, as if it were planted in our

minds by something divine. Something with an

agenda. The snow is high on all sides, towering

above us in close approximation of actual

topographical realities. Hillocks and other

deformations of the otherwise gentle earth. It is as if

11

we have found the other part of the torn parchment.

The key to the pronunciation of all terms. The

explanation for the wavy lines and other additions

obviously drawn on afterward by shaky hands. By

people frightened of what they were doing. Maybe

this means we won’t be hearing the trumpet come

morning. Or maybe it just means we have protectors

in high places but they don’t wish to make our

acquaintance. They would prefer to be left alone.

Which is our response precisely. We don’t care if

there is some purported connection. We have no

more use of portraits adorning the walls of our

houses than we do of shoes with no heels on them.

Or bread that has grown moldy because it was left

on the kitchen counter, outside its plastic container,

and every time the people in the house pass it, they

assume someone else is responsible for re-

packaging the bread and putting it away. If only

12

because someone else was responsible for removing

it from the pantry and its package to begin with.

Still, our minds are nothing if not pliable and our

loved ones know just the right ploys. They learned

them over the years spent in our company. The way

we know not to jump up and down on the grate in

the sidewalk simply by examining the definition of

the word “grate”. And combining that with our

inherent understanding of the way gravity works. Or

at least the way it is supposed to work when you

read about it in a magazine. The same, say, where

we discover a mountain of oysters has appeared

unexpectedly on the coast of some faraway country.

As if placed there by someone who wishes to

frighten the inhabitants without using any words.

We suspect the image is supposed to say something

anyway, pronounce it with the same audacity one

finds in the cascading waterfall. Or the bar codes on

13

unwrapped packages of liver. Several species of

oyster, in fact, make up this mountain and the

residents can have their pick. They can sort them by

height or patterns on the fabric laid out on the

ground so as to keep the shells from getting muddy.

They can listen to someone lecture from seven

o’clock in the evening until such time as everyone

has stopped listening. Which usually amounts to ten

minutes. Though occasionally someone arrives

without a dossier, without so much as a piercing on

her lip, and delivers the sort of paean to learning

and excavation, to baring one’s shanks, that those in

the audience have often dreamed about after

consuming too much red wine. Once, I remember

there was a heckler on the beams that run the length

of the auditorium, and he wore a fool’s cap and kept

ringing the bells at the end with the motion of his

head. But this didn’t seem entirely intentional or

14

even out of place. Just one of those things that

happen because something else happened before it.

And a chain was set up. In fact, the heckler seemed

to think it was this chain itself that needed to be

overhauled. Needed to disappear from the scene the

way the mountain of oysters all but disappears from

view when the sun sets directly behind it. In the sea.

And the Babylonian worldview is replaced by any

number of others less concerned with water. And

how it comes to be both above and below us all at

the same time. Falling, for instance, as rain from

cracks in the glass dome overhead. Where the stars

and the sun are expected to parade themselves from

one end to the other every twelve hours or so.

Though, if they were to miss a shift, who really

would notice? Who would call out to their gods in

lamentation? Probably we need to spend more time

ourselves boning up on where everything should be

15

at any given moment. And what we are supposed to

do once we realize the eyeglasses on the end of our

nose, say, are the wrong prescription. They make

everything seem unnaturally vivid, both warm and

cold. With the boundary between these states

clearly visible. It slithers about like a snake. Or a

belly dancer who herself has studied the locomotion

of serpents. Has written a children’s book about it,

in fact, and hopes some day to find an illustrator.

Someone who will know how to capture complex

movement in a very few brushstrokes. Without, of

course, having to be told how to do it. Or that the

loans will come due on the very day she is visiting

the pyramids. We don’t know, of course, of the

existence of the pyramids until after we visit,

because they are mostly underground. It’s said you

can see the very tip of one next to a rusted out silo,

if you squint just right and if the sunlight is falling

16

at a beneficial angle. If not, you can look at the

drawings rendered by those who have seen

something there and have even studied what it

means. That they create that meaning themselves

from line to line, that they interpret without ever

realizing they do so, is something we’ll leave for the

next round of discussion. In the meantime, enjoy

your punch. Down the road, another group of

attractive people is loitering around the back

entrance to the one restaurant in town where you’re

still allowed to smoke cigars. It’s unclear if they are

expecting a handout or if there is an impromptu

protest taking place. How odd that we can’t make

up our minds about what we are seeing even as we

are seeing it, about what constitutes the actual when

only our sense organs are involved. These organs

seem to have been composed of other, more

primitive organs that themselves arose from still

17

more primitive structures the function of which we

can no longer determine. Maybe they had no

function at all but were simply accumulations of

matter that began to look like something vital the

way clouds tend to look like human beings engaged

in various activities even when there is no one

present to observe them (the clouds, I mean, and not

the people, though the distinction is not as

important as it seems). Do they give a prize for

brevity? What does it look like? I prefer the sand

dunes, the tree trunks caught between them, their

tops sheared off by whatever force shapes the

landscape. Or laughs at it. Whatever force pretends

we are of interest when in fact we only register

when there is something amiss. When it feels

threatened by our dirty words. We snake our way

through valleys, trying to seem as inconspicuous as

it is possible to be with ammunition belts on both

18

shoulders and our volumes of Walpole sticking out

of our vests. Please don’t inform me of any

alternatives. I’ve been growing an inch or more

every year since they started enriching the oats,

started cataloguing the frequency of the

thunderstorms as if they hoped to find there some

pattern like that the geese follow when they are over

the Upper Platte. Or that creature termed leviathan,

cause of social sterility because it is identified with

Egypt and Babylon. Just as if these places weren’t

already desirable in themselves. Destinations one

discovers while trolling the brochures at the truck

stop. Before the evening meal of pancakes and ice

water settles and you are off again, searching for

whatever it is that makes us want to continue living

even when it is more reasonable just to give in. To

sink under the weight of our exoskeletons like

diatoms. This is a common enough occurrence to

19

have been given a special designation by those who

study such phenomena. And so feel an almost

irresistible need to make them up. To find the

telling illustration in every street sign and garbage

can they pass on their way to work. And every wink

and sneeze and obscene gesture aimed their way

once they get there. I take the envelope to where

Eulalie is lounging on a deck chair, the sun tangled

up in the trusses of her hair, bits of it at any rate,

struggling to get free. She takes in elements as if

they were junk food, redistributes them to the

weaker parts of her skin. Wouldn’t we like to know

how multiplication really works? How it takes one

thing and turns it into something else right before

our very eyes? As if the trick consisted in

manipulating the wiring in our heads rather than

simply recognizing the fundamental properties of

the world. Eulalie has been raised to recite these, to

20

list them like so many state capitals. It is a bravura

performance, to be sure, and every time I try to

goad her into performing, she puts out her hand

instead. Reaches for those places on my person

most likely to reciprocate. To find in contact a

momentary resolution to the problem of evil.

Though, to be honest, it’s not a problem I have been

forced to face directly. Other than the occasional

gastric discomfort. Or a feeling like my tongue is

stuck in slow motion. How do we discern the truly

essential ingredients? Are we supposed to

understand that the big questions haven’t even

occurred to us yet, despite all that time we spent in

our twenties trying to impress the women who carry

a copy of The Critique of Pure Reason around with

them like a purse? Well, maybe there weren’t that

many, but certainly Eulalie knows why I keep

showing up here, my mouth full of cynical re-

21

formulations of the things we hear on TV. She gets

out of the chair, straightens the necklace that hangs

from her neck, a sharp and intricate thing that

always strikes me as potentially deadly. The kind of

thing that people join secret organizations just to

acquire and decode. And who knows, maybe

Eulalie has another life I know nothing about. One

where the sun is not the thing that settles on her skin

like oil. But a human being perfectly capable of

holding a rational conversation. Or, by turns, losing

its mind entirely. Shouting incoherent oaths and

accusations at people who are just trying to get to

work. Temperatures range at that time of day with

the attempts at logic. They begin low and stay that

way until someone can answer five questions in a

row. Without assistance. And with barely any food

in his pocket. We wish to remain as impartial as

possible, but there are always alliances cropping up

22

just when we had begun to assume that no one was

actually talking to anyone else. They get their

feelings hurt and pout like sea bass. But this is just

the first in a series of reversals noted for their

almost supernatural character and timing. Uncanny

things of the sort that induced Theophrastus once, in

penning his portrait of the superstitious person, to

describe a man coming across a snake. And calling

on the god Sabazius if the serpent is red. While

electing to erect a temple to it instead at the side of

the road if the reptile turns out to be the “sacred

snake”. Though no one is sure exactly which

species was given that moniker. Probably we ought

to liberate ourselves from all backsliding in our

research and just deem everything sacred in one

way or another. But there are rules against looking

too closely at what might otherwise scare you to

death. These rules were formulated for the

23

protection of our psyches. But we weren’t consulted

ahead of time and so resent them. How else can you

explain the sarcasm? The parakeets? And the signs

fashioned hastily with crayons and other forms of

contaminant scraped up at the last minute when we

were slogging our way through bogs just to arrive

on time? When we were singing ballads composed

in the dead ball era. Jaunty tunes with Honus

Wagner as the hero, commentary on his penchant

for raising chickens. At the expense of everything

else. Who doesn’t love a myth like this that raises

itself up from the mire by freeing first its elbows

and then insisting that whoever discovers it must

put his name to paper? Must sign his name in bold

letters and take whatever consequences may then

arrive. Four or five gorgeous women on the upper

deck of a bus. Their parasols opening and closing in

unison, like clams. Imagine those in the windows

24

looking down on the scene from their rarely used

studios, checking their own pulses, dabbing at their

foreheads with rags smelling faintly of turpentine.

I’m sure Eulalie knows what the soft part of the

hand feels like when it is reaching for you beneath

the covers. When the rain is beating against the

window near the foot of the bed. And all you can

remember about the previous day is the aroma of

the stroganoff. The ingredients culled from the deck

of the ship when nobody was looking. There are

frogs with horns on the tops of their heads. If you

push on these with a certain insistent pressure,

taking care to injure neither yourself nor the

amphibian, something remarkable starts to happen.

If we were in the movies, it would be accompanied

by the sound of a single piano. And a longish

address that would start the process all over again.

This suggests we don’t know why there is anything

25

at the end of our fingertips. Why the world sounds

sometimes like it was constructed with hammers.

And left to fend for itself in a neighborhood where

the streetlights are so distant and predictable, they

might as well not be streetlights at all, but salmon.

Or memos with no real information in them. Just

empty pages passed from one hand to the next until

something starts to rub off. This is why Eulalie

rarely leaves the house without a bottle of syrup in

her coat pocket. A miniature blackberry brand they

give you for free sometimes at the restaurant. And

you don’t know if you are supposed to swallow it

right off. Or parcel out the contents over a matter of

months. It couldn’t hurt to be frugal. Who knows?

The injury to your neck might heal. And then

everyone will know that you are not to be trifled

with. They will see the potential repercussions

ahead of time. Looming there like a stranger in the

26

window. And they will ask themselves what have I

done to deserve this? Why are there any choices at

all? It took a while to see the joke in the same light

we did. To understand what exactly was at stake.

Squid discovered you can’t sing off-key and expect

people to acknowledge your presence in the street

the following day. Try telling that to the man who

dresses as well as the rest. But isn’t allowed into the

primary circle. He too probably has limbs, and even

some organs, made in a factory somewhere. And his

ideas are no more preposterous, ultimately, than are

theirs. But it’s a matter of pride with him, really.

This perpetual keeping to the side. It’s the same sort

of thing that invites you to chase women when you

know the result ahead of time. When they are so

fleet of foot and phenomenologically-minded, not a

single compliment from the store of such you keep

written down and stacked in a trunk in the basement

27

is apt to stop them in their tracks. Not an ice cream

bar. Not even a telegraph set with the cobwebs

knocked off for good measure. Eulalie puts her

lipstick on in the morning, harkens back to her own

days at the easel. A fire to be known, if not

internationally, then at least in the neighborhood.

She’d hike the twenty minutes each way to the

liquor store. And pray all the while that someone

would stick his head out a window of one of the

apartments above the street. And ask her something

that had been bothering him for weeks. She would

know the answer immediately, without really

having to think. The kind of thing that earns one

grudging admiration. That causes people to fear you

without their being able to express that fear in

words. But, of course, no one lived in those

apartments. And so no one accosted her from above.

Some people waited until she was far enough away

28

on the sidewalk to seem like one of those common

mirages caused by convection. By the air rising in

wraith-like patterns from off the surface of the

earth. Even the beach has about it a feeling of grim

business. Of turning one thing into another against

its will. We find ourselves confronted with evidence

of every conceivable shape and texture. Dimes and

dried bits of seaweed scattered about almost too

haphazardly. As if someone has arranged them with

deception in mind. Wishes us to believe the hand of

someone intelligent is wholly absent. To get at

something like the truth, Squid suggests they swim

out beyond the entrance to the bay. Look for

something slightly untamed, a stretch where the

current begins to address you directly in a foreign

tongue. And the harder you try to avoid that

conversation, the more insistent it becomes.

29