~*~
There are many kinds of open
how a diamond comes into a knot of flame
how sound comes into a word, coloured
by who pays what for speaking.— Audre Lorde, “Coal”
JEANNE ’S MEMORYIn response to her inquisitors
It is all about climbing
that tree, the one arm
over the other, the weird work
of joining words to a scene:myself, in a slash of color
where there once was none, conjuring
people in a white field and adding
shrubbery, births, the slap of tongues,
textures of rain. No:I never saw any fairies under the tree
to my knowledge. As I say this,all of Domrémy spools out
from a bald forest where witches,
by legend, inhabited the gaps.
What else is there to remember?
The tree was already half underground.I produce girls moving
through the brown landscape of another location,
a white sky which passes
in the wrong direction. Yes,
I may have danced there sometimes
with the children; but I sang there
more than danced. I go backto some beginning, touching the skins
of the things laid out for display, my feet
still, moving, still wedged to earth.
As if nothing else is important
except what the world imagines
to flash in great detail and be gone.
Perhaps I have seen girls
hang wreaths on the branches;and sometimes we took them away with us
and sometimes we left them behind.
~*~
JEANNE CROSSES
Moving across the border,
one word becomes another.
My name is not Jeanette, meaning my father’s pet,
but Jeanne, meaning woman whom the Lord has favored.
I make this up as I go along.I ride in the cart with the books, iron kettles,
wooden dolls whose limbs
knock out the noise of crickets.
My mother had told me that my father often dreamed
I would run away with a band of soldiers.
I ride with the sick, the out of luck,
the pale woman who gave birth
and died, the furry horseflies that bite
and bite. The drivers mumble into the air—
men who see a road
unfolding in the dark—and I tell them my woman’s name,
that I was sent for,
I am fed and given hay for a bed,
I bring nothing on this journey
but myself:
a child from my mother
I learned Our Father,
Hail Mary, and I believe.The pink baby wrinkles endlessly.
The dead woman begins to reek
although I bless her over and over again.
I see my child’s days open
in toothless mouths of light:the flash of silvery wood in water meets
the churning of wings across sky.
Wash day. The sun is God’s mouth.
The skin the clothes make as I push them down
makes a cry. That could be my head.
My father said that if his dream came to pass,
he would want my brothers to drown me,
and if they refused, he would drown me himself.Oh woman, bad nurse
whose right hand I circled at the church—
eyeless woman, faceless woman, bright
as the ring of white around blood on nuptial sheets—
why did I take your mouth, rise, raise the siege?Catherine, you were worse than any room
I could have walked into.
~*~
JEANNE SLEEPING
I do not know A from B.
Sleep is a ghost made of
other people’s clothes.
In one dream, I lead.
In one dream, I pass playhouses
to loot trash barrels, and move beyond
calling. In one dream,iron sings on an anvil like a traveler.
A bitch circles the town and cannot find
her pups. Prostitutes laugh with their guts
slung over wood terraces, and black flies
suckle their rutted necks. As for other
womanly duties, there are enough
other women to perform them.
In one dream, Godputs his back to the earth in a flax field
and sleeps, his hair smelling of
blackroot and piss. The scarecrow there
points in two directions:
Here. Here. Here.
~*~
JEANNE IN THE COUNTRY OF LOST THINGS
Where I go when I enter battle
is where the breaths of other people
lean in wait against gray skies and we use sieves
to capture rain. In the farmlands,
the plains crack for lack of being walked upon;
birds search for greener terrain
and the glint of something man-made.In the city, keys sing from clotheslines.
The clothes have blown to forests. From a distance,
you can hear the jingle of angles meeting
which is not unlike the flapping of wings.
Closer, they sound like church bells
stuck in one continuous ring. O
how all of them shine
over the piles of wedding bands.In the streets of the city,
children cling to the edges of coats
they believe to be their mothers’.
A calico paces circles
around a limp mouse—or is it
a child’s toy, or a brown socksucked into this country by God’s breath
and which he now calls his own?
The volume of monocles
take up states and shatter themselves
in the sun out of little patience.Where I go is the country
where baby teeth line the beach
and click under the heels of dogs wandering,
where strays waul into dimly lit corners,
where homes groan from the weight of empty rooms,
where mothers cry oh into their children’s red coats,
where the waves crest and crash
like words said in anger—
you cannot take them back—where I lean against the hissing
backdrop of generic trees and sky,
where dim stars beat out their lives
next to those that were never missed—where I go is this country
where I search for the family songbird,
a favorite knife, the story
that took place over two years,
a secondhand boy’s breastplate,
and you, yes father, you.
~*~
JEANNE IN THE PRESENCE OF INSTRUMENTS
The rack, the screw,
the hook with pointed end and eye,
smoldering sticks, cloth in oil,
the jag of an old man’s tooth,
the stake, an arm of rope,
the crushing hammer and the claw,
the wooden yolk, horses
sent in different directions,
rocks dashed to the head and some to the sky,
recitation of saints most would not remember,
skin stripped from the body,
public inquisition,
the strong man and his pick, fire:
these are what little girls are made of.I am threatened with torture
in the presence of instruments.
I confess: the truth is
not the story you’ve heard of that sorry girl
or the virago, the bad haircut done on the fly,
not the men I supposedly loved or the women,
their delicate organs curling inside,
not the dumb soul rising upward
in its pitiful tube. It’s this:I expected celebrations in the name of the King
but also in mine. I attest
I am a vain girl, that my father
wanted to kill me by drowning, that my god
lost his temper and I
practiced the dark law of a soldier.
That a woman spoke to me
and said I must deliver this world,and I desired it, I felt my legs
and they became possible,
my knee bent tensile, wound
like the gut, and I declared toomy beautiful world haunted,
my heart has chanted:
I want, I want.
I am threatened as if my bodyweren’t already confirmed, earthbound,
powder strewn across the happy sky.The tools make no difference.
Where I fly is limitless.~*~
The italicized lines of this series are from Joan of Arc’s trial conducted by the Catholic church, as published in Joan of Arc in Her Own Words, trans. Willard Trask, Turtle Point Press, 1996.