Thank you.
There was such a nice introduction,
I probably should just leave and you'll think well of me.
What's nice about reading, not in your own city--
my own city of Chicago--
is that, since none of you have heard
me read, I can do a very kind of self-indulgent reading,
where I go back and read things I haven't read for a long time.
So I'm going to start.
Kind of, I'll divide the reading in half.
I'll read half poetry and then I'll move into prose.
But I'll start with some pretty early prose poems.
And I think, in fact, that the earliest prose
problem I'm going to read, which is called "Toothache,"
I probably wrote about 18 years ago.
So it's getting old.
And it seems that whenever I write
a poem about missing something, it always then happens to me.
After I wrote my poem "Toothache," I had a baby
and ended up having, like, 29 cavities or something.
But this is a poem about wanting to have a toothache.
"Toothache."
I never had a toothache, but the desire to have one
crossed my mind constantly.
Thinking a toothache was starting,
I consulted a doctor who attributed
the pain to a small insect bite on the left tonsil.
From that day, I resolved to abandon
the hope of ever feeling a quick stab of pain
or a steady musical throbbing.
My teeth were a fortress against invaders, the health spa
of an otherwise decrepit body.
Sometimes I'd see people rubbing their fingers
over a spot on their cheeks, hot as a sidewalk in summer.
Envious, I'd fall off chairs, steps, and bicycles,
trying to land on my mouth.
I took up meditation and biofeedback
to focus some pain in my teeth.
Like children bored with the gifts of a visiting aunt,
they remained uninvolved.
Finally, quite by chance, I found a way
to bring myself relief.
Through a new medical procedure, the dentist
removed one healthy tooth and implanted a large decaying
molar in its place.
It was worth the trouble.
Now when I pass a candy store, I buy the chewiest caramels.
And when I crunch on an ice cube,
the pain is long and complex as a medieval tapestry."
So, I wrote that when I was about 23 or something, 24.