{Saturday's saint}

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 queen
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,
and not otherwise.

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,
who makes her will all that she ought to will

what do you will, Hillary? what hauls you so inevitably
on? what lays the tracks you race, for what will you enter
the fire? the liberated soul no longer seeks God
through penitence, nor through any sacrament
of Holy Church; some things don’t change, Hillary,
you don’t have to make a mistake for them to claim
your every syllable's an error not through thoughts,
nor through words, nor through works; not through
creature here below, nor through creature above;
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
not through justice, nor through mercy,
nor through glory of glory; 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, not through
divine understanding, nor through divine love,
nor through divine praise

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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