Dental Histories
Walter Bargen
July 23, 2023
For Dr. Rick Omohundro
Tell me before you stick your hands in my mouth
Which photograph is it on the table just inside
The front door of your office in Fulton, Missouri.
It’s not the one with PROOF stamped
Across your portrait more than half-a-life ago,
Where there is enough hair falling over your forehead
To almost conceal your identity, not knowing yet
If you needed to conceal the fact of another life
Gone awry or a celebration of all you yet might become.
A mustache riding your lip down, suggesting
Some notoriety, rock band drummer,
Or revolutionary, and the saucer-plate-size lenses
Of your glasses taking up so much of your face,
Clearly dating your long journey to this moment,
All the proof that any of your patients need before
Reclining in the chair to breathe in the sweet gas.
Please remove your fingers palpating my gums
And tell me is it the black & white photograph
Of three men and one woman standing beside each other
Dressed in leather fringed and beaded buckskin shirts,
Moccasins and leggings, facing the tripod that supported
The heavy box camera where a second glass negative waited
To be exposed. It’s your cousin on the far right,
Who traveled maybe all the way from Polynesia or India or Italy,
But most certainly from Virginia, many times removed
From you now that more than a century-and-a-half
Has derailed somewhere, waiting to be rescued.
Still he stands beside the woman, a former ballerina,
Giuseppina Morlacchi, his wife, their romance forged
in the West of pulp fiction, but she died in the real West,
Leadville, Colorado, 1880, pneumonia, age 33. She still
stands between her husband and Buffalo Bill Cody.
The picture exposed between one of the traveling
Wild West Circus acts, as they waited to whoop it up,
fire an abundance of blanks from repeating rifles
in front of the sold-out adoring crowds. They galloped
around the arena, as the West was
being won and lost twice on the same day.
Your patients open wide for a clearer look
before swallowing their own crumbling enameled histories.
From John Omohundro to his stage name,
Texas Jack, immortalized in the song, Texas Morning,
By Michael Murphy: Texas Jack says drink
Your coffee black/It’s your lucky day/5 o’clock
In the Texas morning. Anthem of the Texas Jack
Society that meets yearly. Now you can get on
with it, stick your hands in my mouth so I can
sing the word Texas in the middle of Missouri.
