The Dentist’s Chair
I dreamt of the dentist’s chair, that it wore a smart pair of formica trousers and leant itself back in smiling delight when you sat into it, wanting for nothing but the pallid creases in the backs of your knees, and a bead of sweat to follow the seam, implying that the only viable way to this is through your teeth
And before we left and walked out between the narrow grin of two tall buildings we began crying with happiness at the X-ray of your teeth, bleached out and nailed to a light-box on the wall – how they’d never been asked for their impression on matters until he took the alginate mould, just decaying stoically in your mouth’s dark, but how on the wall they wailed
And now when I turn back to look at you on the street, I see how the brightness of the X-ray has impressed upon my eye and it is present as the tulips flirting on a canvas mount above the dentist’s head, as an extra tooth behind the upper row that is nudged with a tongue’s nervousness, as someone else’s contented child quietly enjoying the just macaroni and butter at the end of the kitchen table as you get on with the chores
But here the dream’s smile began to get a little wan and my own teeth began feeling ratty and the surgery was becoming something we had only remote knowledge of – like the toxic passage of carcinogens chancing their way past your teeth through your knees, and this could be a language the dentist’s chair speaks
Sky Pavilion
We trust the power lines to run forever overhead
to cover our intimacies
and itineraries: taxes and car stereos
schools that double as evacuation halls
a man who will dutifully come
to fix the wires when we don’t see him
there is always one like him to call
Just before the envelope is torn
in a village some miles down
a boy is testing his voice on the comfy
confine of his childhood bedroom
letting himself fester for the first time
He spins a globe by the acid light of his computer
in dim winter, stabs an accusatory finger
at random; tears a hole in its fabric as the power cuts out
