Weapons Grade: Poems

JEAN/JEANNE BARET

J E A N / J E A N N E B A R E T “Baret carrying . . . even on those laborious excursions, provisions, arms, and bulky portfolios of specimens with a perseverance and a strength which gained for him from the naturalist the nick-name of his “beast of burden.” —French Explorers in the Pacific, JOHN DUNMORE I sailed high seas and low— so plate-flat and hot the fish that flew dropped and beat the deck. Then I sunned, though circumspect, one pale limb at a time. No one noticed what linked them: this middle with none of a man’s business. I used a horn to make the proper arch with my water. Five months. Halfway around. I’d be the first. As inflated in their genius as in the contents of their pants, all under Bougainville did not guess save the plant man who gave me salves to poultice a pregnancy, and the thickest books to bear across coral under noon suns. 38 Thus when the boils on my hand burst, one of the males (by the plumage of the island) laid a flower on it and sniffed my neck— he knew. Just the books banked against me kept him from entering me. I made my voice go deeper, I danced on his feet. I ran. Alone on a spit a mile further. I recalled how these islands roast and eat white women if there’s a question of whose: easier to divide. Rabbit-still, I stared at the ship, lagoon bound, bobbing. That night the sailors peeled a coconut crab and found it red with egg and ate it. I watered the plants. On rumor, Bougainville himself sent a man. We are loathe to err, he said. The crew, from bosun down, laughed, then feared, 39 a woman on board, and all that. I got the brig. Then two of the natives ate our mirrors and their deaths made my sex of less interest. In weeks, syphilis showed itself especially among those who did it, as is the custom, in the open, in dance or song, the maidens, they said, forcing them, showing their Ta-hee-tees. They would call out for their salves—Jean, Jeanne. We sailed. No more sun shone for me until the specimen they took wanted a white woman. Then I saw the sun— and ate rats after, chewing the tails down, my merci. Bougainville said I’d be famous, first woman around the world, and he the first Frenchman. He made it sound like marriage, not history. Then he stopped the boat. Here’s an island, he said, for you and the botanist. But I made it back. The footnotes read: 40 She sailed for Madagascar and married a planter. Planter? A few years on Marseille’s dock strutting, rouged, with my mother, and the future lifted—forget history. It’s all plunder for me and my pirate partner. There’ll be a beard soon enough. 41 ...