The late arrival sent a seismic shock through the audience. Everybody noticed her.
Everybody, that is, except the man of the hour.
He–the poet of our time–had lost faith in the main text. Which was, on the face of it, himself. Signs of his loss of faith included posture–the slumped shoulders, the self-corrections, the way he squinted at the words; words which, presumably, he knew by heart.
The woman’s arrival fifteen minutes into the reading at the university theater–free with a nominal donation–might have qualified as rude or disrespectful, and some believed it to be a ploy. An empty seat in the front row? Unlikely. Yet there it was, and as the seats rose, some unlocalized camera eye craned to capture her, and she might easily have risen on a video screen to the left and the right of the speaker, which instead, inexplicably, showed him, Kranston Dunmore, reading a poem that twenty years ago the New York Times had opined “raised the bar for cultural relevance in our culture-free zeitgeist.” Which quote was parodied and cited often as an example of the culture-free zeitgeist itself, delivered without irony.
How did one ramble, given a published work? But Dunmore was doing just that. It was positively distressing to see.
She was gorgeous, impecccable, in an all-black ensemble–business suit topped with a beret. Androgynous couture that only served to emphasize her classically feminine shape.
But Dunmore didn’t see her. Or maybe he did, and his failure to acknowledge was an index of his self-exile as a relevant voice. You could see it happening in real time. You could judge, at some level, whether the Times and other voices of record stood revealed as a sham. I think it’s possible we all pictured this–the heads of university humanities programs, the deans of high culture, the names on everybody’s lips, the wearers of patched corduroy jackets and turtlenecks, embarrassed and ashamed before a thing of actual beauty.
If only he had put a stop to the charade. Closed the book with an audible snap, gone down into the audience, prostrated himself before her. Abased himself. Which was something he would have done in the past, before his elevation to an icon of high seriousness. When Kranston Dunmore, established figurehead of Kultur, sometimes appeared at your local dive as Kranny Dun–punk rock poet, so much in love it had actually driven him mad. Possessed of a spiritual force manifest, concretized in his lean, muscular frame. In those early works he was practically prostrate to the goddess. He didn’t care. And the goddess, amused and flattered by the recognition, even if she’d heard the same spiel a thousand times before, listened.
We wanted him to cry and cut himself, to burn her silhouette into his chest with a blowtorch. We wanted him to see that only in a posture of submission before the late arrival lay any hope of redemption.
But he failed. He mumbled a few names in acknowledgment of the decision made at a faculty punch to bring him in as a speaker, at great expense.
She, on the other hand, was grace personified. I think I even saw her approach him afterward, and he smiled, and she smiled, and then the picture changed.
Now it was clear. He had won her by continued application, and the fumbling and mumbling and failure to acknowledge were his testament to how she continued to move him, even now.
Mirror-Craft 