Alison Deming
Thank you so much, everybody for being together today.
Steve was my colleague for about 21 years.
And I think all of us who had any time with him
in the last weeks of his life felt that it was such a gift.
He taught us how to face death.
And he showed us how to die in a way I never would have guessed.
So I wrote a poem for Steve.
He had this amazing quality of making
you feel you were a more dear friend to him than you ever
deserved to be.
"The Toothbrush."
"I'm trying to remember you without nostalgia,
thieving your words and hoarding them,
because all that I'm getting is the toothbrush you carried
in a mug every day, down the corridor,
heading for the men's room, to commit
a small act of resistance against break down.
I always laughed.
You have the best hygiene of anyone
in the department, which was a joke.
Because the stink of cigarettes surrounded
him like the fry oil of a prep cook.
Still, something like tenderness inhered in the mug
and its rigid little daisy.
Here's 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 spiderweb tattooed around her pussy.
I'm sure that was the word.
Offense 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, you're kidding.
That's incredible.
A poet can find wonder anywhere.
And I did wonder how strong a woman had to be
to take that kind of pain.
Here's how we said goodbye.
I came to visit you, the nurse recalibrating your drip as you
ask, '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 another's grief, as if to be animated
were to violate the pure encroachment of the inanimate.
There was a kiss.
Me walking into the bathroom and then
to bed where you lay in shuttered afternoon light
Like others in the room, whatever privacy once meant,
it meant no longer.
And you seemed nothing but this invitation to tenderness.
And what kiss was this?
Not 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.