Paula's House of Toast

Puff

Sex and turf. The secret motors throb.
Sacs and bladders plump and throats engorge
to lure with song, appall with inflatus.
The wolfish and the catty horripilate.
The coxcomb swells, the blossom’s pouting lips
enrouge and moisten for the honeybee.

So, blowfish, tetrodotoxic, float
deluded in dim, elemental blue.
Your folklore outfits fiendish bogeymen
with clever hooks and brilliant, flashing reels,
all soluble in venom (holy, pure,
devoid of ego sum) in the denouement.

But where are your comfort stories now, swellfish,
when your first awful, airful glimpse of self
is in a watery mirror falling fast
and your last thought is God, was I that fat ?
Self-puffery in monosyllabubbles !
Long knives await us all. (You too, Fugu.)

6.26.99

Inhabiting the TV screen for his 15 notorious seconds, he looked quite ordinary -- a middle aged, crewcut man, dirty blond and of intermediate physique, casually dressed in sweatshirt and jeans. He was standing in a crowd, and shouting. This was, we were told, an anti-gay marriage rally in San Francisco. That explained his peculiar stance -- arms raised, palms upward -- as an attitude of ostentatious prayer. It also explained the icy blue hardness in his eyes, a piercing unblinking gaze readable instinctively, wordlessly, pre-cognitively as aggression and anger.

There had been another image, wierdly similar, a few weeks back. It was another anti-gay marriage rally, this one at Boston's State House. This time it was a woman. His counterpart, in fact: middle aged, clad in jeans and sweatshirt, neither fat nor thin, elaborately, blondly coiffed. She could easily have been his wife. She was sitting crosslegged on the parquet floor of the State House. Her arms, like his, were raised heavenward. Prayerful, palms up, splayed fingers heavily beringed and terminating in long, incurving, stigmata-red fingernails.

Invoking her deity. Inviting him down from an aerie somewhere vaguely above the Massachusetts State House's gold dome. Keen for his endorsement, his imprimatur. And certain that she has it. She's inspired by it, puffed up with divine afflatus, armed with scripture and faith. She is carried on a wave of something that feels transcendant, more than herself, sanctified. She tingles: Holy Spirit or hyperventilation ? Arms outstretched, she seems to plead to be overtaken: Leda summoning her Swan.

Under the banner of her particular version of Christianity -- a constitutionally illegitimate banner -- she would institutionalize her primitive prejudices, her fear and distaste, the feeling in her gut. She would make it legal scripture of the highest sort -- constitutional scripture.

Gut paired with God. A dangerous project.

What if every mayor followed Gavin Newsom 's brave example ?

Hit it, Louie --

Birds do it...

Bees do it...

Even leafless February trees do it ....

Let's fall in love !

Fifty Two and I go a long way back, so far back that it seems a part of me. An appendage. Supernumerary digits. It's the year I was born. (That's 1952. AD.) Which means, mathwise, that last week's birthday makes me a fearfully symmetric Fifty Two.

Fifty was tough. I hadn't yet gotten over turning forty. Honest. But fifty. Ack. Even the word. Say it: fiffffffty. All those F's. Like something exhaling, deflating. Or dust, as in from dust to dust, sifffffting to the floor. For fifty one I concocted a spiffffy if psychotic bit of denial : Fifty ONE ! One ! What a TINY number ! I am in my EARLY fifties ! I swaggered about feeling young for about ten minutes. It worked about as well as Uncle Gordon's explanation of why one should find thunder reassuring: it means the lightning's already hit, and you're safe.

What about the next bolt, Gordon ?

So, thinking about age as I have been this week, I found myself constructing a chimeric woman out of metaphors of bodily decrepitude.

I began at the top with salt and pepper. Or should that be hoarfrost and snow ? Tough call. Moved down through crows'- feet, beak and turkey wattles. No birds were harmed in making this golem And bags. Lower down, dugs. In back, straight from the Sahara, a hump. Chicken legs. Paper skin. Fishscales.

Medicine is more euphemistic. Virtually ecclesiatic. Presbyopia. Presbyacusis. Presbyesophagus. Old eyes, old ears, old throat. Trinitarian and Calvinistic, indeed. And what about rebirth ? Or presbyeverything ?

Gerontologists have a category for the extremely aged. The old old. I've always been charmed by the unusual and honest anglosaxonicity of of that phase.

As usual, the language reflects gender power structure. Presbus: old man. Geri- and geron-: again, old men. Dementing, senile, we also occult an old man: senex. As in seigneur. Sir. Sire. Senator. Senior citizens.

Is there a female vocabulary of age ?

There's hag, of course. Evil spirit, repulsive old woman. From haegtes -- fury, witch. That's a good one. Creative, powerful. Dominant. Nothing "dotage" about hags.

Then there's crone. Withered old woman. From croonje -- old ewe, carcass. (Cf. carogne, carrion.) An economically useless animal, all bred out. Maggot food.

And dowager. Widow, entitled to her husband's estate. From dowry to dowager: the gender economics of marrige.

Who uses "anile" anymore, if anyone ever did ? "Like an old woman, feeble-minded," explains my decrepit Funk & Wagnall's.

What's in a (loaded) word ? The clinic abounds with more mundane examples. Is the 70 year old woman who springs fluidly from the exam table "spry" or simply "agile" ? And is "cute" really the best word to describe that 90 something, tweedy professor emeritus ? And is a woman "sweetie" or "Mary" or "dear" at 85, when at 45 she was "Mrs. Jones" ?

As we age we become Other. Strange, frightening Things. Mementos mori. Young people look through us, look away. Or stare in horror, thinking "Not me !"

"Don't get old," said a 87 year old woman to me Friday, smiling ruefully. "I'd rather get old than die young," I replied. Then paused. "Except I might be too old to die young."

I'm waiting for the next bolts, Gordon. And the last.