What might my late parents have thought, I wonder, to know that there would one day be an occupation known as Tooth Painter? Here’s a partial job description by Day of Oakland, California.

Tooth Painter

He was tall, lean, serious

about his profession,

said it disturbed him

to see mismatched teeth.

Squinting, he asked me

to turn toward the light

as he held an unglazed crown

by my upper incisors.

With a small brush he applied

yellow, gray, pink, violet

and green from a palette of glazes,

then fired it at sixteen hundred

degrees. We went outside

to check the final color,

and he was pleased. Today

the dentist put it in my mouth,

and no one could ever guess

my secret: there’s no one quite

like me, and I can prove it

by the unique shade of

the ivory sculptures attached

to bony sockets in my jaw.

A gallery opens when I smile.

Even the forgery gleams.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2009 by Lucille Lang Day and reprinted from The Curvature of Blue, Cervena Barva Press, 2009, by permission of Lucille Lang Day and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.