C4 antho - Chamber Four

The Night Dentist
___________
by Ron MacLean
from Drunken Boat
The night dentist has one cold hand held near his heart.
He wakes to taillights on the Longfellow Bridge. He rides
above the water on the day’s first Red Line run. Subway
brakes scream. Mirror fingers flex frigid―bone white. His
eyes burn. He blames his patients. He seethes silently:
feared, resented, ill-conceived. He dreams of bicycles. Professionals
in flight. In transition. His face mirrored in the
window is not the face he remembers.
He is not prone to accumulation. He is accustomed to a
captive audience, a mouth frozen open, admitting his hands
(one warm, one cold), his increasingly sterile tools. The burden
of conversation, the opportunity, is his. He has questions
he wants to ask: why it is always dark; why he is sentenced to
nostrils stained from antiseptic mouthwash. Thoughts and
half-truths: no man achieves all he wants; we all make some
accommodation with the night. A thin band of orange light
burns at the horizon. Faces not his reflected in the pre-dawn
window.
The night dentist protests innocence. Untucked misfit in
a middle school library no different at 51. Why do you
hunger for what does not satisfy? He dreams of fish scales.
Electric fence games. To caress a cheek. A tender gum line.
If you were to commit crimes, what crimes would you
commit, and why.
He tires of latex and cynicism. He longs for fresh fruit,
non-nutritional salt snacks, fried fish. All night, every night,
he fingers sterile tools. Flexes for circulation. Coveted