There are so many ways to fall apart. Live past 50 and your teeth start to go. Turns out human beings weren’t meant to live past 35 and our teeth will crumble like rock on a northern exposure. If you have money you can go to the dentist who will do her best to replaster you. If you don’t have money you can say aloud like the poet Charles Simic who has a poem with this line: “Brothers My Teeth Hurt and I’ve No Money to Have Them Fixed”. This isn’t funny. We’re dying over here. We’re lucky to be going slowly. That’s the goal. Erode slow. Think fast. Don’t confuse the two. Hold the live wires in opposite hands. Try not to touch them.
A friend once slipped on the stairs. He broke his ankle. Then he got a blood clot and died. All because he went fishing. The steps were on a boat. He was going below to get a beer. He was having a good day. He was a funny man. He trained guide dogs. He liked blind people. I miss him. He told fabulous dirty jokes. He was a volunteer fireman and he loved his wife and kids.
What did I do today? I worried about appointments and the Rococo picture frame of capitalized nonsense and I felt like a failure chasing illusions. I tried to link my thoughts with those of minor administrators. I wanted to take a walk in the autumn woods and smell the cinnamon ferns, listen to crows fighting in the crown of a birch which, in autumn is a foolish thing for the crows are easy to see amid the golden curls of birch leaves which of course are starting to fall. Only crows believe they are imortal. Crows have no teeth. They don’t need to read poetry because they “are” the poem. You can check Poe or Ted Hughes or Anselm Hollo’s excellent bookCorvus.
I’m of course now conflating crows with ravens but that’s what happens when your teeth hurt. One resents the louder scavengers. Lumps them together.
“Easy, easy,” he says. “You are now thinking of the sweet corn of boyhood and those excellent teeth of yesteryear.”
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 