The Poet   By Melissa Tawn   The Ultimate Woman may just have something special.

The poet John Edward Remington burst onto the literary scene like a meteor. His first book of poetry was published at the age of 21. Three years and four books later, he was a superstar of the sort never seen before in America. Halls, then auditoria, then stadiums filled to capacity by people who came to hear him read. Over 45,000 turned out to hear him in Yankee Stadium, then over 80,000 people came to the Astrodome, then over 100,000 to the Rose Bowl. Rock singers and symphonic orchestras vied for the right to set his works to music. His popularity was compared to that of the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and to American poets such as Walt Whitman and Vachel Lindsay. But JohnER, as he was popularly known, was more than them; he was something far more spectacular, far more special. In an age when people mourned the death of literacy, and certainly literature, he sold more volumes of poetry in one week than Sandburg and Auden, together, sold in their lifetimes.

But then, at the height of his popularity, Remington disappeared from view. Only after a hiatus of five years, a new volume of Remington’s poetry appeared, entitled “Desperately Seeking Leah”. Unlike his previous vibrant and sensual work, this one was introspective and private. Like Petrarch seeking his Laura, Remington was in search of a mysterious woman, “Leah”, whom he claimed to have met but briefly and to whom he dedicated the entire work. The reviews of this book were mixed, with many critics calling it “derivative” and “self-indulgent”. After that, John Edward Remington wrote no more. Who Leah was, if she really existed at all, nobody was ever able to discern.

It was ten years after the publication of this last book that I set out to find what happened to John Edward Remington. Let me introduce myself. My name is Elizabeth Clay. I am 35 years old, and a PhD student in American literature at the University of Illinois. If I am older than my fellow students, it is because I had spent nine years of my life as an FBI agent before I realized that analyzing literature interested me much more than detecting and solving crimes, and left the Bureau in order to return to school.

After I chose Remington as the topic of my PhD thesis, and set out in search of him, I called in some chits I still had with the Bureau and was able (unofficially, of course) to look at his file in the FBI computer. It seems that, at the age of 19, JohnER had been arrested in connection with a barroom brawl in Chicago. The charges against him were later dropped. However, before that he had been fingerprinted, and a copy of those prints was duly filed in the FBI computer. Now I had a copy of those prints too.

It took me a year of painstaking investigation, and many false leads, but after that period of time I found myself in the college town of Moscow, Idaho. In a cluttered used-book store, not far from the University, I came across a balding middle-aged man who only vaguely resembled the dynamic young man whom groupies by the hundreds used to follow from appearance to appearance and adulate like a rock star. But it COULD be him. I asked the man for a copy of “Desperately Seeking Leah”, and watched carefully as he took it from a shelf and put it in a bag for me without wrapping it. I then took it back to my motel room, carefully dusted it for fingerprints, scanned them into my laptop, and compared them with the prints from the FBI’s file. They were a perfect match!

Here, in the obscurity of the Palouse Valley, selling used textbooks to students and Harlequin romances to bored housewives, I had found the greatest poet America had ever produced.

I returned to the store just as he was getting ready to close for the evening. “You are John Edward Remington,” I said, “and I would like to have a talk with you.” He did not protest. Meekly, he closed the store and led me to a small restaurant two blocks away, where he normally had his dinner. On the way, I told him who I was and how I identified him.

“I have no interest in ‘outing’ you, if you do not wish it,” I assured him. “But I do want to talk to you about your poetry and, first of all, I want to find out about Leah.”

JohnER’s eyes clouded over, he leaned back in his chair, and seemed to enter his own private world. Then, slowly, he began to speak.

“It was at Oberlin College, where I was spending a two-week period as visiting writer in residence. As part of the deal — which was very lucrative I may add -- I was expected to give a series of talks about poetry, illustrated with readings from my works and the works of others, to a select group of English majors. At the first of these lectures, she was sitting in the front row of the room, directly in front of me. She had raven black hair and black eyes, a pale complexion, and radiated femininity in a way that I had never seen in a woman before. She hung on every word I said and, when I recited my own poems, I noticed her lips moving in sync with mine — clearly she knew all of my poems by heart. After the talk, when I talked informally to the students, she remained in the room, but did not come up to the dais to introduce herself, as did most of the others. Instead, her eyes followed every gesture I made, from a distance of several yards away. Nonetheless, I felt her from afar, enveloping me and drawing me to her, without any regard to the other students in the room, some of whom were blatantly and futilely trying to flirt with me.

The next day, she was in the same place. I delivered the talk just to her, trying my best to make eye contact and mind contact with her. Again, at the end of the talk she remained in the room, but did not approach me. This time, however, I walked up to her, and asked her name. She whispered “Leah”, and began to say something more, then suddenly changed her mind and rushed out of the room. It took all of the will power I could summon, to remain calm and not rush after her. I had been totally smitten with a girl who had, so far, said only one word to me.

After the third talk I was bolder. I came up to her and asked her if she would care to have a bite to eat with me. I could see the inner struggle in her, before she finally, with downcast eyes, agreed. I took her to an Indian restaurant near the campus. We talked about poetry, and the role of literature in an electronic-media society. Typical superficial dorm-room or undergraduate-seminar philosophizing, but slowly she unwound a bit and told me about herself. She was a junior, and hoped to be a poet some day. No, she dared not show me anything that she had written. I could not concentrate on her words. It was her presence which overwhelmed me. I felt, as I had never felt before or since, that I had met The Woman, the ultimate icon of femininity the batting of whose eyelash could launch a thousand ships or a thousand sonnets. As we walked back to the campus, I felt like a 15-year-old boy on my first date. I took hold of her hand, lightly. She pulled away, slightly, and then extended her hand back to me. It was so slender, so delicate, like a piece of Meissen china. We stood there and I slowly raised her hand to my lips and kissed it. I then held it against her cheek and lightly kissed them both.

When she tensed up, I knew I had gone too far. Still, I could not let go. The next day was Saturday, and I asked her if she would meet me again in the morning. Again, her painful inner struggle was evident, but in the end she agreed. I could not sleep that night, in anticipation.

We met at 10, and sat under a tree in a secluded part of the campus. I brought her the most special gift I could think of, a sonnet I spent most of the night writing just for her. (It was later published as the first poem in “Desperately Seeking Leah”.) She cried when I finished reciting it to her, and I put her head on my shoulder and kissed her, this time on the lips. She did not resist, but the tears kept on flowing. She was obviously fighting with herself and then — a victory! She put her arms around my neck and returned my kiss with full fervor. Soon, we were deeply entwined and engaged in an act of mutual oral exploration. She was divine. I felt that I had to go farther, farther. My hand slowly found its way under her skirt, and inched its way upward. She tensed and tried to stop me, but not before my fingers touched … her penis.

Before I could say a word, Leah jumped up and ran away, crying. I never saw her again. On Monday, she did not come to my talk. When I went to the rooming house where she told me she lived, I was informed by the landlady that she had moved out on Sunday, and did not leave a forwarding address. Afterwards, I hired the best detective agencies available to try to track her down, but it was no use. She seems to have disappeared off of the face of the planet. Finally, I wrote my last book of poems, dedicated to her, in the hope that she would read them and make contact with me. But she never did.”

He leaned forward, as though trying to regain his lost balance.

“Leah haunts my dreams, day and night, ever since. To me, she was the ultimate woman, even more so because of what I had discovered. She was not a woman by birth, but she was a woman by choice, and therefore even more perfect. She had chosen her goal, and had accomplished it so perfectly that I felt like a crude oaf with my clumsy verses. Having seen a vision of perfection, I found that I could write no more.”

“Perhaps it is you who were mistaken, and still are,” I replied. “You totally misunderstood Leah, and because of your misunderstanding, you were incapable of appreciating her, and therefore lost her.

You say that she chose to be a woman. If that is correct, why did she still have her male sex organs? If she was a junior in college, she certainly had enough ‘real life experience’ living as a female to qualify her for sexual reassignment surgery. Such surgery is not cheap, but it certainly costs less than one semester’s tuition at Oberlin, and so would have certainly been a viable option for somebody who can afford to enroll in an expensive private college and dream of poetry, rather than some more mundane and well-paying profession, as a vocation.

No, Leah did not choose to be a woman, femininity forced itself on her. It was in her when she was born — ‘hardwired’ as the computer geeks would say -- and she could no more have resisted being a woman than you could have resisted being a poet. The fact that she still had her male parts shows that she had not yet come to terms with this. She was still trying to find her way. Maybe she was looking for guidance in poetry — your poetry.

You sensed her inner struggle but misinterpreted it. It was not you she was struggling against. She was trying to find a way of expressing her love for you, for she clearly loved you as deeply as you loved her, in the manner which her feminine nature dictated but consistent with the physical facts of her body.

She needed your love, but your love for her as a person, not as the ideal woman. By treating her not as an individual, but as an icon, you only made things worse for her. No wonder she had to disappear. No wonder she would not respond to your book. You made her vanish with your poetic wand.”

“You cannot be serious,” he said angrily, “you cannot! You don’t you what it was like, and you cannot know what she was like. You are just being contrary."

Under the table, I took his hand in mine, moving it up my skirt. He felt and understood. I knew exactly what I was talking about.

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Acknowledgement: The picture used above, called "Poetry Reading", is by contemporary artist Irene Sheri.