Eighty-Three Percent Complete

She was iconizing. When I met her she was

eighty-three percent complete. They had finished

mixing thirty shades of purple, blue and lavender

with gold, the color of pale wheat, into an orange

porridge of cement, whose crucial part in turning her

into immobile art she had at last relented to accept

and lend assent. As she neared the full extremity

of being placed so unextractably – immaculately

and exquisitely positioned into the invention of her

own meticulously measured space – to encase

her in posterity – she had a moment, while she still

could breathe and speak, if not quite blink or cause

her cheek to blush, or eat or drink, to tell me just

what she had come to think about her destiny. Had 

she wanted it? Not at first. But it had slaked her thirst

for an identity. At last she could be fixed. To iconize

effectively meant to homogenize into a steely, known,

describable, unparalleled exactitude, a singularity

whose moral etymology and sense could be ascribed

religiously to myths of her as mistress of far greater

powers than had been imaginable in mortality.

She’d have a provenance that everyone would know.

She’d be admired and remembered and invoked

and undergo a transmutation from the flesh back

to the word. As that word, she would be heard.

.