She and the fire

fight adjectives. Their concreteness
deflects reification

by language. She simply is
a pronoun. It may signify

say, my wife (coming from me
'she' often does) or, yes

a medieval French woman, her being
so roughly abridged

by the pronoun, as brutally fed
to the fire. Regarding the fire

dazzling, heaving, devouring
won't do. It only suggests

a familiar occurrence: ouch
when flame touches skin. Indeed

flame doesn't suffice (rhymes with lame)
and a pyre, much more poetic,

based on the transcripts based on
wordy statements. So much

reliance on the makeshift engine
of abstraction, language. She

did, I think, end in fire, but hero
saint, witch, schizophrenic

won't do. Will numbers rectify
the flaws of alphabetical signs: 1412

to 1431? Historians can't be certain
about either: no records

other than her reserved guess
on the first day of trial

apropos birth, and her famed death
also contested by theorists

of bad conspiracies. So I can't
force the ephemeral stuff

of her matter into a mould (a poem)
with description, facts

or even an attempted evocation. She
floats and evades

perhaps – if I may hazard a simile –
like her ashes, diffused

by an English guard over the Seine.