Climbing Trees & The Dentist
Climbing Trees
If someone should ask me
When did you last climb a tree?
I would say
last Thursday, at five in the afternoon,
and I was terrified.
I pass it everyday on my after-work-walk,
until one day I think, I should climb it.
It demands to be climbed: a great spreading deciduous crown
down the hill from the chapel by the Lee Building, in whose shadows
I once waited for vice-presidential candidate Al Gore (who never showed).
It overlooks the Route, Fraternity Row’s white columns, the
mad rush of traffic.
The first branch is six feet high.
It’s been years, since the old house,
pines leaving sap on hands, rubbing sand between them to scrape it off,
perfectly formed maples down the hill, the dogwood on the front lawn.
I look around, see if anyone is watching.
Tuck shirt in shorts, put keys in sock by ankle, swing legs up and gasp.
Hands shaking, feet unsure of contact on ant-scurrying rough bark, blinking
at the distant grass, lips dry, muscles taut.
Not like a child.
Not quick and scurrying, to escape the “It” in tag,
not smooth and fluid, leaping from branch to branch, never looking down.
A breeze, the tree whispering, as I look through the canopy at people walking,
the waning sun, as my heartbeat slows I dare to turn in the perch between
three rising trunks.
There’s a red abrasion on my forearm, the toll for this climb.
But it’s worth it, for some reason, to be perched in the branches,
so that you wonder why you ever stopped—
as if we ever had reasons to climb in the first place,
so I suppose to the definitions of old age we might add
old age is a failure to climb trees.
The Dentist
i have never had a cavity
so the tension builds every visit
to an unendurable crescendo,
nerves twanging, flinching
the hygienist scrapes metal down my gums
sound like cracking enamel
poster of white people racing boats
try, and fail, to disassociate
i brush enough, you’d think
(my record speaks for itself, thank you)
but still my mouth fills with blood,
i know the lecture on flossing,
i stop her before she winds the glossy strands
ready to garrote the victim, beg off
to avoid her cracking my jaw open
to get at molars no one ever bothers with
raised on maryland well water,
my suspicious mother wouldn’t let me
take fluoride treatments in elementary school,
i drank a gallon of milk a day
or so i claimed to friends, so that,
genetics, or stupid luck has made me this
dental superman, but all it feels like
is a curse
no one understands my fear
my daughter says vaccinations are worse
i’d trade a million shots in my upper deltoid for
this agony of expectation, because one day
it will happen, so twice a year I stagger out
gums sore, my exiting prayer that I will die
five and three-quarter months
after my last appointment
David Galloway is a writer and college professor of Russian. Born and raised in Maryland, for the past twenty-five years he has lived in upstate New York. His poetry and essays have most recently appeared in Watershed Review, Comstock Review, Atlanta Review, the American Journal of Poetry, Typehouse, and The Remembered Arts Journal.
Photo Credit: Logan Tozzi, New Mexico Review Staff