{ ... and Sunday's revision}

Marguerite Porete to Hillary Rodham Clinton

“Nature demands nothing which is prohibited.”
from The mirror of simple annihilated souls and those who only remain in will and desire of love

oh lady, I know why you stay with him. any woman
who’d be a saint or president’s got to have a man
to vouch for her, to swear it’s God speaking
and not the devil – and what a woman
he made you. a favor with his pants down,
the best thing that could have happened to you
was his flag-waving infidelity – you went from ice
to just like us in the space of a television minute. me,
I’d rather die a heretic than live under the thumb
of some priest, but that’s a martyr speaking.
and for that, they stripped the name from my book
for three hundred years. but the words, even the fire
couldn’t divorce them from me, from the God-in-me,
the Soul is satisfied by this nothingness which gives
all things. For the one who gives all, possesses all

the temptation to power at any price is nothing new –
France in 1306, America in 2005, neither
a good time to taunt authority, religious or secular
if there’s a difference, neither a good time to stand
without your man, or the best of times, depending
on your endgame, what kind of annihiliation
you’re aiming for, do you know at condemnation
they called me une pseudo-mulier, a fake woman,
in other times I would have been beatified, St. Catherine,
St. Juan de le Cruz, we all preached the same doctrine,
the death of reason, absolute submission to our God,
no wrong possible because all that this Soul wills
is what God wills that she will, and this she wills
in order to accomplish the will of God

what do you will, Hillary? what lays the tracks
you race, for what will you enter
the fire? some things don’t change, Hillary,
so long as you’ve got ovaries and a throat
and choose to use the latter you’re a threat
without need of any other weapon
-- but you know that, don’t you, the stake’s
just the thing for us, you know there’s a bullet
with your name on it or worse, a lover
in Boston, that woman you swear to silence
every visit

your secrets are safe with me, Hillary. Marguerite
of Hainault called La Porete, your sister in tongue,
strongly suspected of heretical depravity, fuck
their oaths. when they haul you before some false
and festering court, remember me. disdaining
to seek absolution, obstinate in these rebellions,
oh they called my book, that divine ink, a pestiferous
lie, I don’t know of what they will accuse you, perhaps
that man will buy you enough time to shift the tide,
to make the bench your own, to alchemize
pain into power or gold, but one hundred years
to the day from my fire came Joan’s, Hillary,
to endure the fire you must become
the fire, become the fire before they turn it
against you, there may be time left for you,
for all of us anonymized and shunned
into dust, the second coming will be a woman,
they burned that book on first reading, be
the third, Hillary, make your body the pyre
in which they, this time, burn.

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