My Dentist Reads Me His Poetry
Mouth full of instruments, I am his most captive audience.
My dentist waits until both my cheeks are packed with cotton before he begins his recitals.
This is not an accident. Dr. Mehta has a waiting room, a receptionist, a whole parking lot of moments when I am capable of speech, and he has never once read me a poem in any of them. He waits... He waits for the bib, the little paper clip chain, the suction wand parked in the corner of my mouth like a patient snake. Then he pulls his stool close, picks up the scaler, and says the six words I have come to associate with fluoride and fate: “I've been working on something new.”
I have been his patient for six years. I have heard, by my count, forty-one poems, all of them delivered to a man who could respond only in vowels.
It started at my first cleaning. Somewhere between the polish and the rinse he asked what I did, and I made the mistake of gargling the word “writer,” and his eyes above the mask went bright like two little exam lights. “Poetry?” he asked. I said “uh-huh” because it was the only thing I could say, and it was true... and it was the most expensive syllable of my life.
The early poems were about teeth. I want to be fair to him: they were bad, and they were about teeth. There was one about enamel as armor. There was one comparing a root canal to forgiveness, which rhymed “decay” with “away” with a confidence I still think about. There was a limerick about flossing that he performed, performed, while extracting my wisdom tooth, and I laughed at the exact wrong moment, and I want to say for legal reasons that the chip in my molar was preexisting.
Here is the thing though... Here is the thing I didn't expect.
Somewhere around year two, they stopped being about teeth.
He read one about his father teaching him to shave with a cup of tea going cold on the sink, and I stopped hearing the suction. He read one about his daughter leaving for university in Toronto, how he kept finding her hair ties in the couch for months, little black commas, he called them, punctuating a sentence that had already ended.
I lay there with a mirror in my mouth and thought: that's better than anything I wrote this year.
And because my only vocabulary was vowels, I became, accidentally, the most honest critic in his life. I couldn't flatter him. I couldn't perform. If a line worked, I went “mmm” from somewhere real. If a line didn't, I went nothing... and the nothing was audible. Once, during a poem about monsoon season in Pune, I made an involuntary “mm-mm” at a limp stanza, and at my next appointment he told me, casually, syringe in hand, that he'd rewritten it because, and I quote, “you went flat in the middle, and you were right.”
My dentist revises based on my grunts. I have never been more useful to literature.
People collect funny poetry encounters the way they collect airport stories, and for years this was mine. The punchline dentist. My friends would ask for the flossing limerick at dinner parties and I would deliver it and take my laugh, and some small disloyal part of me always felt cheap afterward, because by then I knew what nobody at those dinners knew.
The man was getting good.
Then came the appointment last November when he didn't read.
You have to understand how wrong that silence was. He did the whole cleaning without a word beyond “turn toward me” and “you'll feel pressure.” No new material... No old material. Just the scrape and the little hook and the radio in the ceiling playing soft rock for nobody.
When he finally sat back and pulled his mask down, he looked like a man who had been awake in the wrong ways, and he said, “My mother died three weeks ago. In Pune. I couldn't get there in time.”
I had cotton in both cheeks. I had a bib clipped to my collar. I reached up and gripped his wrist, and he let me, and we stayed like that for a second in that little room that smelled of mint and burning.
Then he did something he had never done. He took a folded paper out of the pocket under his scrubs, not the phone he usually read from, paper, soft from handling, and he asked, actually asked, for the first time in six years: “Can I?”
I said “uh-huh.” Same syllable as the first day. Different price.
The poem was about her hands. About how she checked his teeth herself when he was a boy because the dentist in their neighborhood was for emergencies only, how she'd tilt his chin toward the window for light, and how he had spent thirty years tilting other people's chins toward a light and had only just understood whose gesture he was repeating. He read it in a low voice, no performance in it at all, and when he finished, the suction wand was still gurgling in my mouth and I was crying down both temples into the paper headrest cover.
For six years a man read me his heart while holding a drill to my teeth, and I never once got to say yes.
So I finally said it. I made him wait, cotton out, rinse, the little spit, all of it, while he stood there embarrassed, and then I sat up in the chair and told him with my whole working mouth: that poem is finished, and it deserves readers who aren't sedated. I told him about the profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, ordinary people, dentists and bus drivers and grandmothers, and how his poem about her hands belonged with the ones about family that strangers stay up reading. I told him to enter it in a monthly poetry contest and to put his real name on it, Dr. A. Mehta, because his mother had not tilted his chin toward the light for him to publish as Anonymous.
He said he'd think about it... which in Mehta means no.
So I made it a standing appointment. Not the chair, the café across the street from his practice, first Saturday of the month, where the tables wobble and the coffee is average and nobody is holding a drill. He reads. I answer. In sentences, with consonants, like a free man.
The first time we sat down there, he put the sugar between us and said, “Strange to hear you talk,” and I said, “Strange to be allowed,” and we both looked at our cups for a while because six years of friendship had happened in a room where only one of us could speak, and neither of us knew the etiquette for level ground.
He submitted the poem in March. He lost. He was radiant about it. There were four hundred entries, he kept saying, four hundred, as if he'd been let into a stadium.
Last month I got a reminder card for my cleaning, the usual one with the cartoon tooth. Under the appointment time, in his cramped prescription handwriting, he'd added: “New poem. Bring your grunts.”
I keep that card on my fridge. And on the first Saturday of every month, on a wobbling table in an average café, there are two coffee cups, one for the poet, one for the audience, and after six years I finally get to clap.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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