| |
Open wide, he commanded, this will pinch,
Poked the soft gum with the back of his probe
To fool it into being numb enough to receive the
needle.
In spite of dental euphemisms, I panicked, eyelids
clamped closed, fists clenched,
Stubborn tooth held relentlessly in pliers’
persistent grip,
Twisted from resistant jaw with a sickening crunch,
Then plopped like a tiny fetus white and red on
a bed of gauze,
Outside me for the first time, a sudden relic.
Many patients get hysterical, he cajoled as I wept.
How could I explain? My tooth has been part of my
skull
All my adult life. Second bicuspid, sharp and functional,
As comfortable as a longtime love,
Its loss impossible to foresee or forestall. One
bite
And when it cracked a sickening irreversibility
Forked from my nerves.
When the wound heals, he will reopen it
And install a new tooth, a facsimile in strong plastic,
Fit to last for my remaining finite years.
At home, in bed with ice and gauze-packed mouth,
I fell asleep as light filtered through my windows,
And afternoon sounds drifted up from the street,
Just as I did as a nineteen year old, thirty-three
years ago,
Sleeping off the anesthesia that robbed me of my
first unborn
Drifting in and out of the same distant sounds,
the same filtered light,
The air I’ve breathed all my life.
For years these old windows have framed my vision,
Protected me from wind and rain yet let the seasons
through
Have given me a view, or used to. (They’ve
not been washed in years.
Crazy Nick—who used to put a nickel in his
right ear for luck,
Fasten his wide belt to window hooks and climb outside
to dangle
Ten floors up, scrape away the grayish film to clear
my view,
Splashing dirty water on the sidewalk below—
Has been rendered obsolete by new “self-washable”
windows.
These days he’s a 21st century Quixote pedaling
aimlessly up the avenue;
No more bucket, wipers or rags hanging from his
handlebars,
No more heights to conquer on his daily dirt and
death defying crusade.)
My teeth I treat better: flossed and brushed and
exposed to ultrasonic hygiene,
Small stones picked clean of lichen and washed at
the ocean’s edge.
I do not want these windows yanked from their frames.
Is it their fault they’re old and imperfect?
I realize how fond I am of their mullioned panes.
Three by three by three, nine panes each.
Two where I sleep, one where I bathe (pale lilac
paint peeling), one where I eat,
One extra large where I work, four by four, a total
of sixteen.
So many panes, held by peeling frames —
Fissured, warped, crackled, creviced,
Leaking cold in winter, marshmallowing heat in July
Rattled by wind, they angle and stick, refuse to
open or close.
These glazed panes.
I mull it over:
Imagine new ones in their place, an improved, more
efficient life.
Justify the expense, in lieu of unforeseen emergencies:
Dental work, insurance, incipient bone loss, weak
knees, bad back
And the deeper cost:
The loss of charm, of art; a violent substitution
of generic design
Trading asymmetry for symmetry, old lace for spandex,
The heedlessness of youth for middle aged precaution.
Who cares if snow blows in or heat escapes, or the
air is less conditioned.
When I was twenty I didn’t own a fan. I liked
to sweat. I had art,
And energy, and sharp eyes for hypocrisy and beauty.
If my windows were dirty I washed them myself, pretzeled
and wet.
And no curtains or shades. It was my religion, this
refusal to obscure the view.
I vowed always to let in the light (until the day
a man approached me in the supermarket
To say he liked to use binoculars to watch me brush
my hair).
Now my plants have grown tall and shaggy, and the
shades are covered with dust.
When I smile, through the dark hole where my tooth
used to be
Gleams a gold crown on the one behind, a gaudy gypsy.
Of my original thirty-two, only twenty-three remain.
He will take them all eventually, that thief in
white scrubs,
Midwifing my mouth down to bare gums.
My therapist asks if I have considered the relationship
Between windows and teeth. Especially for women,
With our gnashing and vision, our weather and storms.
Windows, the eyes of dwellings; teeth, guardians
of the body.
Both, the gates the world comes through,
(Invisible life, passing through and through),
Portals to the senses and the body’s gullies,
A riddle: strong, yet brittle; open, closed; prone
to crack.
Guardians of day, steadfast sentries of night; though
shaking at the root
Still able to bite, reflect, rattle, shine, smile,
reveal what’s within.
Agape for food, light, utterance, passage of breath;
First and last, and all that comes between.
|
|
