flashquake Poetry
Dental Records
by Gary Cozine
- It wasn't the way you ate eggs yolk first
- And cut the whites into quarters, then eighths
- Or your silhouette in a crowded room
- Your random quotations of Kundera
- Or how your head tilted left when you kissed
- It wasn't your identical laugh/sneeze
- Or the octave of your voice before noon
- Or that you knew Bob Gibson's ERA
- None of these things will be what they turn to
- When after eight days they find your body
- Submerged in a canal next to a field
- Of teething calves beneath the dentate leaves
- With only the crown of your head showing
- Your pale face beaten into a fine pulp
- Then dragging you to the edge with a rake
- So that forensic odontologists
- Can fill your mouth with milky white plaster
- Yet for hundreds of years ontologists
- (Kant, Schopenhauer) wasted so much time
- Hours and hours writing and thinking
- Digging down, trying to locate the root
- Searching for some sort of final wisdom
- Hoping their desperate searches would reveal
- The seat of individuality
- When all the while the answer was there on
- Either side of the quills they chewed upon
- In the end our singularity
- Isn't located out in the cosmos
- Or even buried within our souls
- Who you once were will be ultimately
- Decided by how well you brushed your teeth
- And whether you could buy silver or gold