She was no stranger to waiting.  It took her five hundred years to become a saint. 

Which the poet of the Vaucluse, René Char, found suspect.

JOAN BURNED GREEN

The canonization of Joan of Arc? 
No theologian or man of god, my thoughts move elsewhere. 

But I would have fought alongside that young girl, near her, for her,
because, in her time, she was right to conjoin mysticism and rebellion. 

Sometimes I think of what her physical presence was like. 
(It is nothing like the testimony of the witnesses at her trial.)  

Torso cut into a vertical rectangle, like a plank of walnut. 
Arms long and vigorous. The Latin hands still evolving. 

No ass at all.  As if her buttocks refused to fill out
when she sensed she would wage war. 

The face the opposite of barren. 
An extraordinary presence, emotional authority. 

A living mystery. No breasts at all.  Vanquished
by her chest.  Two hard ends.  Flat high stomach. 

Back smooth and supple, like an apple tree’s trunk;
energy over muscle, yet hard--like a ram’s horn.  Her feet!  

After wandering long in the hoofprints of a fattened herd,
we see them rise with shocking force

to attack the flanks of war horses, beat back
the invaders, trace the nomad choice of a place

to pitch camp..., and in the end her reward was to endure
the afflictions suffered by the soul tortured and driven into solitary.

This is translated in terms of earth, the “green earth of Lorraine,
battle-weary, blood on the ground,”

there remains “the sacred earth of Reims.  
Pale, hospitable to--dungeons. Earth of

the untouchables.  Earth glimpsed below
the pyre’s wood.  Earth blazed. 

Earth maybe utterly blue in her aghast
glance. --Ashes--.”

4

Tears pour from Anna Karina’s face during the pyre scene in Vivre sa Vie when she retreats to the cinema to view Carl Dreyer’s Joan of Arc.  It’s relentless: Falconetti’s shaved head, her bloodshot eyes, white walls, black robes.  And the young, unravaged Antonin Artaud, whispering to her of paradises elsewhere, adds another dimension of tragedy beyond the film itself that Dreyer couldn’t have predicted.

Why would the scrupulous Robert Bresson have made another film about Joan after the matchless Dreyer...?

Sound.  And that when in prison the most important thing is the door.

There’d be counterpoint:
the sound of cell
doors clanging and the cutting back and forth

between French and English
voices,

(he used the actual
transcripts)

dogbark, chain-
clank, discrete

elements, her feet
in isolation, her expression
when the three women
lift the covering sheet to
check out her virginity

again,

monks’ robes, soldiers’ uniforms,

the English straining to glimpse
 
through cracks in cell walls
the girl, when--

God help them--

she isn’t looking;

the fatal drumroll.

There’s no escape
from what the seer sees.

And there’s no way

around recurrence;

the seer must pay.

5

There were times when people saw her everywhere;
places she’d never set foot in.

There may have been sightings. 

I do not know, and yet the sci-fi “sightings,”
imbue them with questionable, if not specious

powers, and fueled the arguments against
her being pardoned:
it is her “image” that makes her so dangerous.

Present tense dangerous?

Just so.

The Bishop had no right to call for private interrogation; some of the prelates walked out of the trial in protest.

Her story’s unfinished. 
And not because she died at seventeen,
or her heart scorned fire--...it’s that her ultimate
intentions, the method behind
the discourse
                        were never taken for more
than cunning, artful delusion.

Innocence her passport to ruin.

It comes down to faith.  Either you believe
she opens a door onto a mysterious world and then
closes it, or you don’t; and if you don’t
then you’re in league with the forces of right. 

(And the still unborn--Age of Reason.

Which we’re still trying to unravel.
Remember Rousseau’s shock
when he happened on
a stocking-mill factory
in “virgin forest”?)

But to think that at the end she was still concerned for the souls of her prosecutors.

What God might not do to them!

                                                           
RIDER’S POSTSCRIPT TO “JOAN”

Of course you’ve read Michelet on Joan.

Not.

I see.  It’s fine for Mark to make things up, to see things as he pleases, but not for a great historian like Michelet whose history, I mean histories, of France are increasingly vilified for inaccuracy.

And he is only another indelible source I pressed upon you to consult before you lost yourself

in casuistry, the indeterminate adrift,
in smokeless fire, in fashion, in malign uncertain
                                    pluralisms, which

--amount--

            to subtracting intuition whenever
                        doubt is sighted and nailed down
            like a computer virus.

Foray is the operative word.

That’s good, as long as you stay clear of...
            military connotations....
Forays in the South Pacific Theater meant
            certain...death...

to the unwary!

The keenest quester has to sleep sometime.  The will...is never more than...

World and Idea, as if life’s orchestra offered more!

Michelet was neither wrong nor right.  But if you’d read his book on Joan you wouldn’t have had to ask if Jeanne D’Arc was attractive.  Canny, intuitive, Jules Michelet (unlike your infinitely less significant Jules Bastien-Lepage, your painter for people who care more for the what than the how) isn’t remembered for his gaffes, which no one beyond fellow explorers-in-the-field, can identify anyway. 

Or magic.  Don’t forget La Sorciere.  That one I do know.

Or that, with regard to Joan, he treats her as not all that far out for the time.

Magic’s contagious?

Or are there times in human history
when the ineffable baits its hook,
when the miraculous stands at ease
alongside the commonplace?

No one, neither Moses, Blake nor the saints to come
can ever count on being visited.

And don’t forget Elijah’s cup.
His thirst is not defined by limits;

a fool is one who measures the amount of wine
missing from His cup, the silver

chalice you let that diehard eternal outsider/wanderer
drink from and drain every time Passover traces its own

reoccurrence, and the story, once
again, compels both the avid listeners

and those who have no time for time,
that sector which, more fatigue-stricken than malicious,

masking desperation with such a masterful
imitation of being there in more than body,

only long, beyond language
to recline, as the service will, in time,

enjoin them.  The prayers bless relaxation.
Slouching; slithering.

So you never held it against me that during one of those early Passovers over whichyou presided--perhaps the first one at which I was required to play my assumed role as your somewhat interested (in the proceedings), diligent and responsible “son,” the thick, scratchy, woolen pants Mom demanded I wear to look correct began to burn and itch so much I could no longer cope, so I crawled under the table and pulled your socks down and tickled your ankles and whispered “let’s go!” and when you didn’t so much as tap a response, I tied your shoelaces together, crawled out and onto the stage and fell dead asleep behind the drawn curtain.

Not if you don’t hold it against me that I didn’t really notice until it was time to leave and your mother, in that wry way she once had, said quietly, and without a trace of worry, “I wonder where the child is.  Where do you think it is?”

When you stood up, I heard the crash.

There was no crash.

You buckled forward onto the card table.  It collapsed.  I heard the crash.

No, I simply knelt down, untied the knots, which I wasn’t until now aware that YOU had tied (though in retrospect who else could it have been), and regained my equanimity.

You weren’t angry?

No, people were scurrying everywhere, clearly happy with how the service had gone and even a little high from all those slugs of sweet wine and talk of freedom; besides, Passover isn’t a night on which I would see fit to punish acts of mischief.  You seem to forget that I knew my Freud--I expected certain acts of hostility from you towards me--and I didn’t expect you to behave like a model anything.