Deming - Stairway to Heaven

THE TOOTHBRUSH

Heres how we met: me on job interview fresh from New England trying not to sweat in desert heat, you after friendly dinner with Gail and studio tour and poetry talk driving me downtown in some big junk car with no AC saying Barrio Hollywood and Hotel Congress and the Shanty. Then came the test: the story about a whore in Nogales who had a spider web tattooed around her pussy. Im sure that was the wordoffense was the point and I understood implicit was the question does your poetry trump your politics? This was in those years when women were correcting men as if sex were a policy that could be rewritten in a pencil stroke. I passed, laughing it off: Oh my god youre kidding thats incredible. A poet can find wonder anywhere and I did wonder how strong a woman had to be to take that kind of pain. Heres how we said good-bye: I came to visit you, the nurse recalibrating your drip as you asked, have I got any time? And you, thumbs down, facing it.

I saw you catch your breath hand to throat beneath the black t-shirt, some event the hand would contain, some moment of self-consolation, like air was alien. Aurelie called it the weird majesty of death that had come over all of us, people gathering in a circle, each face reorganizing itself through the eyes of anothers grief as if to be animated were to violate the pure encroachment of the inanimate. There was a kiss, me walking you to the bathroom and then to bed where you lay in shuttered afternoon light, others in the room and you seemed nothing but this invitation to tenderness. And what kiss was thisnot familial peck, not lovers open-mouthed encroachment, not parental seal of approval but the mouth opened by the final so quiet need to say there is nothing between us that needs to be cleaned away. for Steve Orlen (19422010)