the triptych:
INSTANT REPLAY
THE DAY MY DENTIST, GEORGE OLSEN, WAS CROWNED HERO TO POETS ACROSS THE WHOLE COWPOKE COSMOS
SMART-MOUTH: Mandibular Prognathism*
© Paul Zarzyski. All rights reserved. These words may not be reprinted or reposted without the author's written permission.
INSTANT REPLAY
There’s no scrimmage below
this threshold of pain—the dentist
rushing to keep the hole open
with quick spurts of water, cold
air and steel, penetrating
beyond Novocain’s reach
to the deepest territory of nerve
centers. I’m trapped and double-
teamed on a cross-block sweep,
stampeded by the entire backfield—fifty,
maybe sixty, single spikes in all,
but just that one bare screw
(the plastic cleat stripped away)
puncturing the lip as a leather
punch pokes a hole in pad strap.
I stumble up, groggy, spitting
practice field sand, bitter
blood and something solid
snatched clean from mid air—
that blind swat on impulse
toward the annoying buzz.
And opening the tight fist
slowly, shadows of fingers
lifting above the palm, I see
this tooth—surprise of natural pearl—
raw and lustering, long-
rooted in the pulp of my hand.
Imagine the wintry loss of antlers,
those rosettes, tender and flecked red
where pin-prick vessels severed, the raw
pockets in skulls of bull elk
open to the blizzard wind
at night. Imagine these hands
right before your eyes, magician’s
hands, whiter than cuffs
they reach from out of nowhere,
fingers coaxing the tooth
to rejoin with mandible—the pearl
with oyster—the constant force
and weight of a thousand hands—antlers
pressed back into the skull. Imagine growing
stronger, feeling less with more pain,
like lovers or broken bones
together the second time around.
For Doc Odorizzi
THE DAY MY DENTIST, GEORGE OLSEN, WAS CROWNED HERO TO POETS ACROSS THE WHOLE COWPOKE COSMOS
Tilted topsy-turvey and periodontically probed
for umpteen hours—feeling Mickey-Finn-tipsy,
launched by a laudanum-Novocain-nitros oxide
cocktail toward the planet Amalgam—I have
barely begun my re-entry into atmospheric earth
when George Doc Holliday Olsen aims me
into the staff lunchroom—a mannequin propped
against the candybar dispenser. My retinae
a couple of paint-shaker gallons of latex red,
I greet dozens of identical-triplet hygienists,
receptionists, custodians, patients
recruited from adjacent offices, any and all
warm bored bodies, easy marks,
the overeager doctor could carnival-bark
across the parking lot from the casino
next door. Beaming a neon
poker machine smile—so bright,
he does not need examination lamps
over his tandem rows of dental chairs—
he politely beckons, Paul, would you
be so kind as to recite for us a poem? I,
hemming and hawing, and seeing merely
double now, think twice about it
before replying gee-whiz, George,
thanks for this Carnegie Hall-esque venue,
this captured—I mean capTIVE—audience,
but every poetic corpuscle is still
clogged in my Polack-Wop noggin
like wet sand in the upper bulb of an hourglass
and, well, I hate to say NO, but…but…
but then I remember my receding gums,
the gingivectomy and pulp testings of numbers 3 & 14
back-to-back with two root amputations
scheduled next week. My pleasure!
I effervesce, breaking right into a toothy verse
making the whole roomful flash
their perfectly-aligned, polished
’58 Pontiac chrome grill grins—but not
one bit as lustrous as the galactic
mawful of stellar ivories
I sparkled like an aurora-borealis-lit sky
when I feasted my refocused eyes
upon the quartet of zeros
at the bottom of my itemized bill—in bold
black provocative caps, beside the entry,
Means Of Payment, that ebony-tusked word, POETRY!
For Dr. George Olsen
SMART-MOUTH: Mandibular Prognathism*
(*a condition where the lower jaw outgrows the upper—alleged to have been derived from the princely Polish family of Mazovian Piasts.)
Novocain turning my face to stone, I learn
it’s my last remaining wisdom
tooth Doctor Olsen is crowning
in porcelain—right side, right brain,
sanctum sanctorum, holy of holies,
the tabernacle, the cranial grail
frothing hot with creativity, and what is
creativity if not the infinite
rainbow bridge of wisdom between
body and soul? I’ll gladly stroll
to my grave still grinding that day
whatever toil or torment
this perfect imperfect world
causes to stick in my craw, thanks
to the jut of my lower jaw,
my bulldog underbite
aligning my right upper
second molar with this
one bottom third molar
miraculously granted its sovereign stay
decades back when Doc Ordorizzi—army
airborne jumper of the Rhine
behind enemy lines and, thereafter,
deemer of fear as redeeming virtue—
must have incurred a lethargic lapse
into compassion.
Soft food be damned,
I plan to exit this earth chewing
still on life’s hardtack,
flossing with coarse mane hair
of a bronc. I’m going out kicking,
spitting into the hurricane eye
of ignorance. I’ll not bow to
fiction or fact, to all the ballyhoo
and foofaraw, the flimflamming boogeyman
humbuggery, or the sheep’s wool
pulled over our eyeteeth by queens,
high priests, presidents, kings,
soothsayers, succubi or tooth fairies
scamming to snatch our last
molars from beneath death
bed’s pillow soaked with drool,
with dreams unlived.
I’ll renounce Satan,
decay and gum disease. I’ll gargle
daily with Mexican perfume—blue agave
tequila reposado—shower my wisdom
tooth in euphoric bright lights. I’ll yodel
like a lone wolf rodeo poet soprano
extolling the arioso’s holiest note,
my tongue tucked, head tilted back, crown
blinding with its brilliance
heaven’s Mensa intelligentsia—them gaping
dumbfounded while regaling
in the scintillation of this royalty,
this Epicurean jewel, this numero thirty-two
virtuoso oracle holding court,
ruling the roost, cock-a-doodle-
dooing until closing time
my loftiest thoughts from its deep-
rooted, four-legged stool at the end of the bar.
For George & The Gang
And for Doc John Martin
