Some Other Garden Read online

  SOME OTHER GARDEN

  BOOKS BY JANE URQUHART

  FICTION

  The Whirlpool

  Storm Glass (short stories)

  Changing Heaven

  Away

  The Underpainter

  POETRY

  I Am Walking in the Garden of His Imaginary Palace:

  Eleven Poems for Le Notre

  False Shuffles

  The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan

  Some Other Garden

  For Guy Ducornet and Rikki Ducornet

  And for Anne Pippin Burnett and Virgil Burnett

  CONTENTS

  I.

  THE LITTLE FLOWERS OF MADAME DE MONTESPAN

  THE BAROQUE BED

  Shadow

  Museum

  The Baroque Bed

  The One Before

  The Grotesque Geometry

  Bright Rumours

  Venetian Gondoliers at Versailles

  Your Hand Carves

  An Amusement in Twelve Movements

  ARTIFICIAL FIRE

  Games and the King

  Words

  All Around the Palace

  The King Advises His Son

  Choosing the Subject of the Fountain

  Notes for the Machine at Marly

  I Am Speaking the Difficult

  The Palace Closed

  Anonymous Journal

  Planet

  Terre Sauvage or The King’s Nightmare

  Necessary Pause

  Birds

  Marly le Roi

  Turning Back at Dusk

  THE POISONED SHIRT

  Some Other Garden

  The Porcelain Trianon

  The Anonymous Journal

  Evidence

  Le Roi S’Amuse

  The Vermilion Box

  Horses

  The Years Departing

  The Poisoned Shirt

  GLASS COFFINS

  Anonymous Journal

  Winter of 1709

  Silenced

  Lady Reason

  One Memory of Opening

  Doctor Fagon

  Glass Coffins

  Hall of Mirrors

  II.

  ELEVEN POEMS FOR LE NOTRE

  Photo Credits

  I.

  THE LITTLE FLOWERS OF MADAME DE MONTESPAN

  La Vallière, so ’tis said,

  Is losing favour fast

  The King goes to her bed

  With boredom unsurpassed

  Now Montespan takes o’er

  Things, as we’ve seen before,

  From hand to hand get passed

  – Eighteenth-century street song

  The Baroque Bed

  SHADOW

  The sun decides to

  enter from the garden

  moving on the carpet

  he touches all your furniture

  crawls under your closet door

  investigates your wardrobe

  moves his arm across

  your memories

  substituting light

  and heat and silence

  he erases last year’s

  conversations with the stars

  changes the contents of your mirrors

  invents an alternative

  palette for your crystal

  scrapes his nails across brocade

  revealing tangled threads

  like contours on a map

  he polishes your tables

  his brilliance clings to cutlery

  till spoons become large

  bright incisions

  all across the grain

  a weight of gold and heat

  he stops burning

  at the flesh of your neck

  you are the only shadow in the room

  MUSEUM

  The objects he had touched shifted. Walls crumbled. Courtiers vanished with crystal, cutlery, diamonds in their back pockets. Frescoes peeled. The garden grew.

  Absolute dispersal. The vast auction lasted for years. There was vandalism, forgery. And then the relocation, loose fragments drawn into new configurations.

  Catalogued items: a nail from the shoe of a horse. A broken mirror from a private chamber. A scrap of paper mapping out the garden. A cutting of brocade.

  Saved artifacts: seven prayers he breathed in haste. Four denials. A goblet full of memories. An urn for everything forgotten.

  There, the display case exhibiting his women: passion, wit and reason. Sorrow, poison, order. Jewellery, costume and a broken quill pen.

  Objects of pleasure: the prow of an imported golden gondola, the torn sail … a toy Spanish galleon. Fireworks, a miniature pageant, false porcelain from the first Trianon. Twelve masks, playing cards, dancing slippers. A stuffed swan.

  The palace: gold leaf particles … a fractured fresco. This piece of marble, once part of a fountain. And then this candelabra, found not too long ago, intact.

  THE BAROQUE BED

  From the framed centre

  a cloth folds

  its golden threads

  brush the floor

  brocade lambs graze

  unicorns prance

  a shepherdess in the shorn

  world loses

  her slipper in the chaos

  white peacock

  feathers at the edge

  knots and tassels

  dance in the air

  they call this passion

  I am lost in the fabric

  smothered by your private furniture

  I know the loom that dreamed this bed

  THE ONE BEFORE

  The one before

  walked in these rooms

  gazed in these mirrors

  and searched her thighs for flaws

  opening his cupboard

  pouring this decanter

  her mind set sail for landscapes

  where you might stop

  to choose a gift for her

  a snowdrop pressed inside a book

  birds frozen in a cage

  the hours filled with

  preservation of her flesh

  her hair and face and muscle

  till laying down her brush

  she felt your absence speak

  as though you hadn’t nodded when

  you passed her in the garden

  or kept a place

  beside you at the table

  now I fill these rooms

  and search the mirrors

  I listen to the sound of strings

  caressed by fountains

  those imperfections in the glass

  her face thighs

  lost in silver

  the ghost travels with me

  to your chamber

  THE GROTESQUE GEOMETRY

  My dress conceals

  the structure of the rooms

  shaping afternoons into

  a grotesque geometry

  everything I touch

  billows over edges

  these sheets

  those plumes

  the satin skirt I fling aside

  I appear in windows

  I dissolve in doorways

  outside my skin

  your pulse is moving

  growing through the silence

  into confusion

  BRIGHT RUMOURS

  At night the window glass

  reveals the self

  the lamps cause fire

  in the facets of my jewellery

  and at my throat

  bright rumours whisper

  outside the garden turns away

  and the windowpanes

  reveal ourselves

  outside

  there is a gulf of darkness

  where everything is watch
ing

  the other worlds have

  vanished

  in the morning

  we’re unable to see

  VENETIAN GONDOLIERS AT VERSAILLES

  Their Republic opened out towards the sea. Long fingers extended to the lagoon. They returned by different routes in a city like a maze.

  Here they sail over a false lake, a captive canal. Still waters go nowhere. They encounter edges. Women won’t call to them from balconies. No one speaks of flowers … or the moon.

  And winter comes too soon. Skins bleach. Bones swell up with dampness and the cold. Boats are frozen in a corner of the garden.

  They wish for raw confusion. Buildings that press back the sun; bridges that teem with circumstances. Not the knives of the doctors, bleeding winter diseases, the cold eyes of women bored by the court.

  Sometimes at night they dream that their bloodstreams have become canals, moving outwards, to the sea. Their lost city, carried here inside the prison of their bodies.

  They’ve forgotten the songs they used to sing.

  YOUR HAND CARVES

  A city floats

  dreaming of Atlantis

  I sleep in a bed

  carved by your hand

  beyond the window

  the population whispers

  secrets that I harbour

  memories I keep

  language is the room

  I entered to escape you

  the journeys taken

  the islands abandoned

  you have clothed

  yourself in vapours

  sent letters from

  a secret lagoon

  I am longing for the amnesia

  your hand carves

  and then the distance

  AN AMUSEMENT IN TWELVE MOVEMENTS

  Twelve candles

  and a dwarf

  Costumes woven

  from garden leaves

  Giant cogwheels

  motivating scenery

  Gold slippers

  Ribbons, ribbons

  He is dressed in a hundred diamonds

  Lights from memory: trap doors

  A three-cornered hat with bells

  Wild boars romp in a sea of flowers

  Laughter

  A solitary gesture

  And my mask

  discarded

  Artificial Fire

  Des jeux de princes qui ne plaisent qu’à ceux qui les font.

  – Illustrative quotation from a dictionary

  GAMES AND THE KING

  Protocol abandoned

  he relaxes in the games room

  he is fond and warm

  and winning every time

  a flicker of an eyelid

  he gambles much

  and loses little

  while they listen for

  the noise of

  their coins in his pocket

  he takes the scent of them

  into his private rooms

  their fingerprints on silver

  he takes much of them

  in the calm rooms

  where the games are

  he is fond and warm

  winning every time

  he leaves little of himself

  the scent of them goes farther

  they are

  paying paying paying

  for the favours of a king

  WORDS

  I’ve always had too much to say

  the witty words they are shells

  from sovereign oceans

  an eternal souvenir

  pour words in the bodice

  wear them

  up and down the staircase

  threading an amusing necklace

  made of words hear them click

  together on the string

  I’m spilling them behind my fan

  I’m filling up my eyes

  with necklace words

  later there are silences

  emptiness of rooms

  he seldom visits

  till the string breaks

  and words spill like beads

  across a marble floor

  in search of freer destinations

  words

  ALL AROUND THE PALACE

  You know the women

  they have paused in your doorways

  run their fingers over

  your tapestries

  memorized your garden

  they have dressed for you

  rearranged their features

  their faces shine from mirrors

  walking through the morning

  on their thin ankles

  blue veins glowing through

  transparent skin

  their nerves are humming

  out to you

  you turn your face away

  you know the women

  they have paused for

  a moment in your doorways

  while they are moving

  dressed in transparent skins

  THE KING ADVISES HIS SON

  Never speak to women

  unless you speak of flowers

  illustrate the garden

  and walk with them past fountains

  but never let them carry your secrets

  they are lapses

  barricade the entrance

  sing them songs

  songs that have heat

  put your head on ice

  absorb their flesh

  ride their passions

  wear their fragrance

  like a glove

  give away nothing

  unless it is disposable

  fireworks at nightfall

  gone from the sky

  then gone from the memory

  a cut flower

  wilting on the stem

  walk with them past fountains

  don’t tell your memories

  they will follow

  polish their flesh

  till it shines

  never make a trap of them

  never speak to women

  walk with them past fountains

  fill their eyes with flowers

  but never speak to them or

  they will come to break you

  CHOOSING THE SUBJECT OF THE FOUNTAIN

  The King wanted each of his mistresses represented allegorically as the subject of a fountain

  – Eighteenth-century rumour

  The subject that you choose

  should cause the fog to gather

  somewhere else

  should cause the wind to portage

  two smooth paths

  around its flesh

  neither equinoctial storm

  nor mechanical thunder

  should harm the heart of it

  the shine of marble gesture

  untouched by pressure

  or the dark

  glistening streams should

  leap from open palms to stroke the

  lip and knee and instep

  all water should be

  rainbowed by the sun

  before it penetrates the earth

  yet you would choose

  pure fountain

  as the subject of my fountain

  a bright transparent curtain

  flung against the trees

  something cool and moist

  to the touch

  a lesser kind of artery

  this shower of indefinite diamonds

  you can turn it on or off at will

  NOTES FOR THE MACHINE AT MARLY

  I have a model, gleaming on my table. Cogwheels and cylinders, sharp and smooth. The machine is responsible for fountains. Moving water.

  Life in the garden.

  I found a larger model in a damp museum, housed in a case of glass and polished wood. Someone had entombed it, given it a brass plaque. I pushed a button and it began to move – even without fountains.

  I told a friend in Paris that I like old clockworks. Disconnected from time … the predictable click of p
assing seconds, they become objects free of consequences. You should see the machine at Marly, he said.

  Someone had disconnected it, taken it away. Vanished.

  In times of drought a hundred engineers worked the machine at Marly. They bent through the night over tables of rain. They interrupted rivers and creeks, sucked up lakes and ponds. The machine spread its system under the ground. It demanded the Seine, Loire, or Rhone.

  A flicker of pleasure grew in the eyes of a king.

  In the autumn the north wind and the ghost of a machine at Marly.

  How to dismantle such a machine? What to do with its parts?

  The garden is stripped of its surfaces. First I remove the fountains, then the statues, remove gravel and grasses and beds of low flowers. I roll up the brown earth. I expose the network of pipes leading to the Machine. Bones of the garden.

  Pipes that lead nowhere.

  In midsummer the machine becomes tired. I witness the fountains, long for the garden that it never saw, imagine labour. In his daily diary the King remarks that the fountains seem “somewhat reluctant.”

  The Machine at Marly. Gone.

  It pushed and pumped. Everyone admired the fountains. Who admired the machine?

  The heartbeat in my dream.

  I AM SPEAKING THE DIFFICULT

  I am speaking the difficult

  syllables of your name

  trees block the last day

  light above them

  stars scatter

  night curves over the end

  of the garden I am speaking

  grey stone is sliding past

  your hip your shoulder