The Jaw at Night
My dentist said you’re grinding in your sleep,
my dentist said the evidence is deep
in the wear pattern of the back teeth where
the anger that I carry into the air
of the ordinary day goes when I sleep.
The anger that I carry goes to keep
its appointments in the jaw, in the grind
of the thing I can’t release in my own mind.
I’ve been grinding my teeth for going on a decade,
I’ve been grinding in the night and the parade
of the things I managed through the day
comes back in the dark and has its say
in the jaw, in the quiet violence
of the sleeping body and its silence
around the anger that it carries forward
into every unconscious hour toward.
The jaw at night is doing the work,
the jaw at night, the anger doesn’t lurk
in the abstract, it takes up residence
in the grinding and the body’s evidence
of the unprocessed accounting of the day.
The jaw at night is where the anger stays
when everything else shuts down, the jaw
keeps working through the anger without law
or guidance or the management I apply
during the waking hours. The jaw at night
has its own agenda and it runs the fight
that I postponed while I was conscious.
The jaw at night is honest where I’m cautious,
the jaw at night does what I won’t allow.
The jaw at night, and now you know the how
of where the anger actually goes.
The dentist gave me the appliance for it,
the dentist gave me the appliance, I wore it
for three months and lost it somewhere in the move.
For three months and then fell back in the groove
of the grinding that the body had been doing
for years before I knew about the ruin
I was working on the teeth at night,
for years before the dentist brought the light
of the evidence to the conversation.
The grinding is the body’s negotiation
with the anger I declined to process.
The grinding is the body’s access
to the anger through the night when I’m asleep.
The grinding is the anger at the deep
level of the unconscious doing what
it couldn’t do in the day, in the shut
room of the management of the face.
The grinding is the anger finding space.
Fifteen hundred dollars in the crowns,
fifteen hundred dollars in the towns
that I’ve been grinding down since forty-one.
Fifteen hundred dollars and it’s not done.
The anger hasn’t run its course in the jaw,
the anger hasn’t found the exit or the door
to the release that would end the grinding.
The anger hasn’t found what it’s been finding
is necessary before it quits the teeth.
The jaw at night is the anger underneath.
The jaw at night is the economy
of the rage that I don’t spend in the waking me.
The jaw at night is the place where the cost
of the anger that I carry is the most
clear and the least metaphorical.
The jaw at night is the most categorical
evidence I have of where the thing goes.
The jaw at night, the dentist knows.
My wife asked me once what I was dreaming,
my wife asked because the tension in the sleeping
was apparent from the other side of the bed.
My wife asked and I didn’t have much to be said
about the content because I don’t remember.
My wife asked and I said I think every member
of the list I carry through the day
shows up at night and has what it would say
if I wasn’t managing it in the waking,
if I wasn’t doing the constant undertaking
of the presentation of the man who has it handled,
of the face I’ve been wearing since I manned the
position of the man who’s fine, who’s got it.
Of the face I’ve been wearing and the jaw at night
takes off the mask and does what it does right
in the language of the body, which is grind.
And my wife hears it and it isn’t kind
to carry the anger into the room.
It’s not just me that lives in the full bloom
of the jaw at night and its work.
My wife hears the anger in the murk
of the three in the morning when the body
does the thing the mind won’t, the shoddy
peace of the sleeping man undone by the jaw.