Paula's House of Toast

In Lithuanian mythology, the oak is the sacred tree of Perkunas, the god of thunder and lightning. Perkunas is classically masculine, Thor-like. He oversees retribution -- smiting evil-doers -- and fructifying -- striking the dormant earth in spring to wake her, then inseminating her with dew. His representative animals are the bull and the he-goat.

I don't much like Perkunas. He seems like a vile combination of George Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger. He's a gender cartoon, all terrible swift sword and sexual prerogative. He seems a made-to-order mascot for the religious right, way more so than Jesus. There's nothing turn-the-other-cheek about Perkunas. He's a cinematic, eye for an eye kind of deity with a robust, pre-modern sex life.

But I'm just two generations away from Lithuania, the Old Country. My nationalistic uncle taught me early on that Lithuanian is one of the most ancient languages, quite close to Sanskrit. He taught me that all words have etymologies. He tried to teach me to distinguish red oaks from black oaks from white oaks by leaf shape, but it never stuck. Nonetheless, I've always loved oaks. For the brown and leathery leaves that remain on the branches in the winter and make a fine rattling hissing sound in the wind. For acorns, with their little Jean-Paul Sartre berets. I came out of childhood viewing Lithuania as the pre-lapsarian paradise of my forefathers.

Then I read some modern history. Read about how eagerly Lithuanians collaborated with the Einsatzgruppen genocide; read about the pogroms, the liquidated ghettos, the killing pits in the Ponary forest.

Perkunas' symbol ? The swastika.



Nebelsdottirs (6.6.95)

Old Herr Professor Sigmacht Nebelfrei
once spawned and made himself three pretty daughters --
Großein, Großzwei, Großdrei --

who traveled by themselves to Argleterror,
Bigone, Bigtwo, Bigthree.
They fled across the sparkling Heimat waters.

One was as fair as blissful Saxony
and lusty as a Rhineland tinker's dam.
First she took the fine name Great and then she

called her brooding older sister Grand.
Grand was tall as a hollow Lindenbaum
and swaggered like a hopeless courting ram;

the last was Gross who pined for hearth and home,
through thick and thick and thick and thick and thick.
A sward, a swale, a whistling piny grove

a cottage made of twenty walking sticks,
the sisters were as rich as Deutschland queens,
with crowns of tooth and roots like leather whips

all tangled beneath the cold reluctant green
of shallow grass. But their woods were full of owls,
and black feathers spun and tumbled on the sheen

of their brooks and anthems; their sky blue porcelain bowls
held cheeses ripening to sour and fetid soap.
There were no cellars deep enough, no holes

whose darkness could in them instill the hope
that they could bear to look upon the closest
to them, and not think of dying by the rope.

Yes, Argleterror was a bitter hostess
to dreadful Father Grimm's expatriata
the lovely daughters gross, grosser and grossest.

I got up early to vote, to arrive at the polling place -- an elementary school -- before the kiddos arrived. To get in my Lenten 20 mintes of relinquishment of discursive thought before that. And before that, the Globe and coffee. A tall order, but I did it.


It's a gray morning, mildish, but with a bite in the air. The school is an old brick building that reminds me of my first school, the John Breen Elementary School in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Presided over by Mr Parthum and his paddle, a varnished, skate-board sized instrument of corporeal punishment. He may never have actually wielded the thing against child flesh. It may have simply been an instrument of deterrance. It was the late fifties, after all -- the era of Cold War nuclear brinksmanship, and the waning days of the spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child philosophy. But one did get "called to the office" and that's where the paddle lived. Who knew what went on behind those tall closed doors. We could only imagine.

Tool World

Two puddles, orange and white,
are two last breakfasts lost.
The big hand springs erect.
The big bell bolts us down.

The Paddle lives in the Office.
The right hand fits over the heart.
The head hangs over white knuckles.
Say trespasses, not debts.

Piddle snakes down a pants leg.
Sixty wide eyes watch a pool
gather under Old Glory.
Thirty hands flap overhead.

She peddles the ABCs
from a bag concealed in her drawer.
There’s a tin hole near the ceiling.
It might be a mouth or an eye.

The world (she says) is a puzzle
of interlocking parts.
Heads snap into crotches,
and arms twist behind backs.

She gave us each a pencil
and one yellow square with blue bars.
A fingerbone screeched across jet black ice.
First lesson: O O O

(1999)

The smell of the Bright School this morning gave me the Proustian willies -- boredom, anxiety, loneliness, suffocation -- all came flooding up. I couldn't get out of there fast enough.

The voting ladies seemed singularly untogether today. Maybe they hadn't hit their stride yet. The main one, whom I recognized from other elections, was as effiecient as usual in extracting my address and name from her big book. There was a second one sitting next to her who seemed terribly confused and distressed.

This excess of voting ladies had something to do with declaring a party affiliation in the primary. Eventually I was handed a ballot in a manila folder and ushered to a booth. Gone, as of a year ago, are those cool lever-operated voting machines. I loved pushing the little levers on the wall to vote, then pulling the big lever to register the votes and open the curtain. That grand, punctuating gesture was a satisfying and dramatic flourish. There's not even a curtain now. Just a felt tipped pen and little circles to fill in. How SAT.

At the exit, there was another voting lady, then a man in charge of the ballot machine. It was refusing to accept the ballots. The man looked addled and distressed. The machine resembled a shredder.

I did not make any wisecracks about Florida.

Only in America: for twenty eight bucks one can buy an ugly tee shirt that states "voting is for old people." No matter how one deconstructs this message, no matter how many layers of irony, cynicism or counter-cynicism one imputes to it, the fact remains that that ultimate cynicism is in the marketing. Profit, not message.

So I indulged myself today.

Pissed at Mr Kerry for his willingness to allow gender-based bigotry to be enshrined in the Massachusetts State Constitution, I voted for Dennis Kucinich.

Trap Music

Blank verse is a trap.
-- Peter Davison

There was a trap, he said,
which had all the trappings of a trap --
cheese, spring, jaw.
So I chewed off my own two feet, he said.
Left three for the trapshoot.
When he shot himself in the foot, he said
Left two left feet.
There was a trap set, he said. Castanet,
snare. Up he flew, flimflam, paradi-
saical,
then down to sleep, ear to the floorboards,
exhausted, footloose, and pining for
the telltale heart’s pingPONG pingPONG pingPONG.

8.11.98