"He says something cheery, and I say something cheery back.
He asked me to open my mouth, and his gloved hand
is already trailing over the poking and scraping tools.
The ugly light is shining in my eyes.
Have I mentioned that I brush my teeth three times a day
and that I floss, not exactly every day but somewhat
regularly?
I got all my cavities taken care of when I was a kid,
and I always go to my six month appointments.
What do they want-- blood?
A wondrous poet I know, 93 fucking years old,
has just gotten two root canals.
Can you believe in God when something like that happens?
Is there no dispensation?
It's not enough that I've opened my mouth.
I have bad breath.
I'm a bad person.
But there's the TV screen to look at,
and I want to confess as if my mouth hasn't said it all--
that I have made many, many mistakes in my life,
and I am extremely fallible and mortal.
And I don't expect a lot from my teeth,
but they are mine after all.
It is.
Isn't it?
My body.
I mean, I kind of like my body.
My knuckles have gone red, and my poems
are damp, nails ragged and itchy.
The dentist in his white mask and his plastic eye gear,
leans back, takes off his rubber gloves,
and begins using his red flashlight pointer to show
me the problems with my teeth.
We've got eight old fillings that soon-- that
need to be replaced, and here's a new cavity.
And this tooth will need a cap very soon, which
doesn't guarantee you won't need a root canal later,
but it will help.
I go into a trance again.
Science is good.
Men in white are good.
Men are good-- humanity.
This dentist is my friend.
He's got an excellent video collection, and a spy camera,
and a little red pointer thingy.
This is what you'd call progress-- technology
and my mouth, which has seemed fine all this time is probably
very likely indeed in need of some very big repairs.
Should it matter that the tooth the dentist wants to cap
is one that he's just recently fixed
by replacing it's filling, and that now he's
explaining that there's more filling than tooth?
How'd that happen?
And I can feel with my tongue that it's
a little jagged frontier, and now,
with this picture on the screen, this image of what once was
a molar, whole and complete?
He said, no, and I went over to the party anyway.
But he wasn't a scientist or a doctor.
On the other hand, I had a suspicion, a doubt,
something in the back of my mouth like a silver filling.
If I had said, no, back, then it would
have been that little silver filling talking.
My dark mouth would have made a word, a new word, a good word
under the circumstance.
I'm in the seat of the car.
The man next to me has logic on his side.
After all, it is almost morning.
I could take action, and then go home to sleep.
I could believe him, believe his whole world, give him my money.
I could give over my mouth to him.
The little red beam trembles around the edge of my cavity.
See?
I used to consult the tarot cards when I was in love,
and the tarot cards would tell me things.
In the quiet privacy of my own bed, in my own tiny apartment,
by the light of a votive candle, I'd
consult the chance gravity of the picture cards.
They tell me what to do.
It was an inexact science, and I'd pursed my lip--
and I pursed my mouth, and be quiet, and listen.
I tried to remember what I knew from before--
you know, my real life.
And I'd flipped to the page in the book that
would tell me something else, something perhaps revelatory.
In my purse, the pamphlets wait.
They have identified things.
The waiting room itself, should I come back,
is filled with possibility.
The dentist is waiting for me to respond to his report
on the inside of my mouth, on the fairly disastrous condition
it seems to have fallen into and all these years
of baffled learning, and glorious one night stands,
and painstaking party going, and then
lots of other good and more homespun things.
He doesn't care if I go to church on Sunday,
or that I left my tarot cards with a woman who tended bar
in Sheridan, Wyoming, a biker who told fortunes.
'I trust everyone, I want to shout.
I trust you implicitly'."
[PAGE FLIPS]
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]