Some Other Garden Read online

  there is nothing in you that wants

  to correct the enunciation

  the connection

  the difficult syllables

  my mispronunciation

  I want to tell you

  how the river runs

  how the garden slides towards it

  how stone and earth have spilled

  towards the edge

  these difficult syllables

  are like birds living here

  they open their wings and vanish

  on any wind that breathes

  THE PALACE CLOSED

  Yesterday your face shone

  out beyond the gates

  warm against my palm

  its gold became a nugget

  today

  hard black iron

  sharp enough to penetrate the sky

  strong enough for denial

  and the palace is closed

  you mention vague repairs

  religious holidays

  your shadow travels

  through the bars

  filters through the windows

  passes mirrors turning

  darker than your heart

  your shadow is locked

  your palace is closed

  I’m carrying

  the glow of your face

  here beside the fortune on my hand

  vague repairs

  religious holidays

  patterns in the future

  you’ve imposed upon my life

  ANONYMOUS JOURNAL

  We were walking in the garden.

  Several men with long tapes were measuring two statues – their height, their circumference. We paused to watch their labours.

  They finished with one pair of marble figures, and after they had recorded their observations in small grey notebooks, they strolled away from us towards some other sculpture.

  We followed. It began to rain. They juggled notebooks, tapes, and umbrellas. Their hands were red from working long hours out of doors. There was a combination of cinder and ink under their nails.

  They saw us staring. The statues and the giant urns, they said, had somehow changed location in the last several years. They had been moved a few inches closer or a centimetre or so farther apart. The dimensions of some marbles had expanded while others had shrunk.

  My friend pointed out that the palace never seemed to change as long as you stayed in the neighbourhood of the tapis vert; that is was always right there, at the top of the stairs, modest and comfortable and precisely the same size. No matter how far, no matter how close. He walked up and down to demonstrate with the palace in full view.

  The workmen were uninterested. They turned away, back to their tapes and notebooks. We left them and continued through the rain as far as the Grand Canal.

  Later, it seemed that the statues had moved much farther apart but, as my friend said, the palace stayed there at the top of the stairs. Unconsciously we paced out the distance between one urn and the next. Passing the place where the men were working we waved to them and their hands fluttered.

  We climbed the marble staircase. The hedges on either side opened up like curtains. Staggering, astonishing huge, the palace emerged with wings and floors previously hidden. And still the space … continuously remote. The only way to lose that distance was to move around its massive edge and then away, always with our backs turned.

  Otherwise its image would follow us home. We walked away. Deep inside the garden a measuring tape revealed the shrinking circumference of a marble thigh.

  PLANET

  You become the farthest planet

  now I can’t identify

  these marks across your surface

  lakes that might be shadows

  craters turning dark

  towards the sea

  and still my notebooks

  fill with your reversals

  moments from this distance

  I can barely understand

  I am a prisoner of language

  a prisoner of moments

  no vehicles have been invented

  to bring me any closer

  each night the constellations

  dance for my approval

  the focus of my bent

  inverted lens

  while I am fixed on you

  on moments I can barely understand

  I am watching

  taking notes

  you are a circle of light

  ten billion miles away

  I am a prisoner of lenses

  a prisoner of language

  waiting for your bright

  deceptive image to respond

  TERRE SAUVAGE OR THE KING’S NIGHTMARE

  Kings have nightmares. Some dream of revolutionary mobs invading their private chambers … torches, knives. My King dreams of Terre Sauvage.

  The Royal Gardener pauses. He unrolls a map of New France. Thin pencil lines reveal a garden plan. This pleases the King. He doffs his hat, mutters a few suggestions.

  Miraculously, ships filled with hundreds of workmen arrive. The task of removing the giant primal forest begins. The first layer, undergrowth and bush, is removed. To the King’s horror another layer of bush appears in seconds. Thicker than the first. No axe can penetrate its growth.

  Winter arrives, halting the project for ten months.

  The following year Le Notre suggests they double the number of workmen and import trained French executioners to fell the trees. This pleases the King. He doffs his hat, re-examines the plan. He objects to the shapes of the decorative waters. They look like nothing more than a chain of great big lakes emptying into a canal, thin and irregular. Meaningless.

  Le Notre explains that they will make fine ice rinks for winter sports.

  The executioners have finally downed the trees. They begin sketching out allées and parterres upon the exposed earth. They begin digging and locate solid rock ten inches down.

  Everything suddenly appears to change. The King finds himself alone, in a thick forest, his distance perception, sense of direction, completely addled. Light barely passes through the trees.

  Somewhere, vaguely to his left, there is a loud roaring noise, like wind. He stumbles through thorns and burs in the direction of thunder. Bits of Royal brocade are left on branches.

  He comes upon the waterfall. He is completely stunned. It lacks symmetry but none the less it is vaster than any waterwork he has ever seen. He wonders how Le Notre was able to design anything so powerful. He doffs his cerebral hat and imagines how greatly this will impress other monarchs. He decides to present Le Notre with a dukedom.

  And then his foot slips on wet rocks. He plunges sceptre, robe and mantle into the churning rapids and flies over. He feels he has become the very centre of a fountain. SCREAMING.

  The following week he eliminates the word glory from his vocabulary.

  NECESSARY PAUSE

  A necessary pause

  precedes the performance

  just before dawn

  splits open to morning

  the hard morning pauses

  they have held your shirt

  caressed your stockings

  pauses

  moments turn back

  those eyes that sweep

  the crowd

  they carry your relics

  contemplate fountains

  footsteps leave no traces

  and the handwriting is burned

  BIRDS

  He cannot make them stay

  or stay out of the garden

  they make their own decisions

  he considers cages

  giant aviaries

  a mesh of metal among

  the trees he has planted

  some stay

  others perch on the outside wire

  they sing louder

  disturb his morning sleep

  the dogs of the hunt

  whimper

  some birds migrate farther south

  they leave hi
m looking for

  their patterns in the sky

  he desires the tiny hearts

  of birds as jewellery

  he invents special weapons to interrupt

  their flight

  generations later

  their fragile eggs break

  expose a path of grace notes

  unharnessed by his will

  it connects the garden

  MARLY LE ROI

  He chooses this location because there is no view.

  Here he can keep his personality intact. His lust tied.

  Directly in front of the palace there is a large hill. The small immediate garden is enclosed on either side by steep cliffs. There is little he can do. This is comforting, at least at first.

  He cannot live there. But he will visit, and bring along his favourites. He believes he will flourish in the company of temporary intimacy and accessible green.

  He can’t sleep. The cliffs cancel his dreams. There is a pressure on the left and right sides of his brain. He is convinced that the hill has moved closer. Twelve different engineers measure the distance from his bed to the first incline of earth. They assure him nothing has changed. He realizes this is the problem.

  He levels the hill.

  During his morning promenade the attending crowd is thin, the atmosphere informal. They chat and giggle in his presence. No one discusses glory or divine right, and the girls turn their eyes to younger men.

  He cuts into cliffs, expands the castle. There is an army draining the enormous outlying swamp. Soldiers in their hundreds die of diseases connected to unhealthy soil. The engineers bring water to the fountains at his palaces.

  He builds four hundred fountains down through the vista where the hill used to be.

  He dismantles, builds four hundred more.

  Two thousand oak trees are brought in from the forests of the Jura. Half die in the process of transplantation. They are replaced with healthy giants. Well-ordered forests appear where once the cliffs used to be. But now they present a barrier to his view from the west and east rooms of the palace. A throbbing begins in his temples. The forests disappear. The are replaced by artificial lakes. Hundreds of guests float in imported gondolas.

  He demands and receives a large cascade where each of his mistresses is represented in stone as either a goddess or a water nymph. More forests appear where once there was only mud and toads. These he sees from his bedrooms, though they are five miles away!

  He has broken the intimacy of rock and swamp wide open.

  Now he feels much better.

  Sleep.

  TURNING BACK AT DUSK

  These are deceptive spaces

  windows bronze

  a cold stone warms

  I’m trying to connect

  the break in the horizon

  moving distance after distance

  there are canals

  thin as gold leaf

  and dreams of fountains

  collapsing at the edge

  trees that tremble

  just beyond my hand

  are miles and miles away

  the oval mirror of the lake

  impossible to reach

  I am trying to move

  distance after distance

  turning back at dusk

  my declaration of withdrawal

  I see the garden

  as near to me

  and as far away

  The Poisoned Shirt

  A third chamber, as it were the anteroom of the above, is correctly named the decaying chamber … the walls are enormously thick.

  – Saint-Simon

  SOME OTHER GARDEN

  The doctors come blindfolded

  into the palace

  they deliver babies

  borne by masked women

  anonymous screaming flesh

  children

  pulled from the womb

  torn from the arms

  the anonymous

  flesh of the palace

  taken to grow in

  some other garden

  next evening

  the women perform at the ball

  prepare their cards for the table

  tiny fists

  close up in their brains

  THE PORCELAIN TRIANON

  The only thing I ever asked

  was porcelain

  a playhouse here

  among the trees

  you gave me faience

  pretending to be porcelain

  see the pools outside the door

  blue and white

  blue and white

  convince me that is porcelain

  porcelain and privacy

  you gave me a forest of spyglasses

  focusing on faience

  blue and white

  convince me this is porcelain

  and permanence

  unfolding here without

  your strict approval

  I want to keep

  my small false castle

  built within the time

  frame of a miracle

  the tiny garden with its urns

  blue and white

  you tear it down

  because you cannot change it

  improve it or expand it

  the little structure

  worked upon a lie

  blue and white

  blue and white

  imaginary porcelain

  shards sing

  all around your feet

  THE ANONYMOUS JOURNAL

  Today I walked as far as the Trianons – an incredible distance. The garden around moves from one point to another. You do not pass it by like any other landscape. It crawls by you and the weather changes before it moves.

  I walk away from the palace in a light drizzle, arriving at the Trianons with the sun full in the sky. It is broken into splinters on the west arm of the canal.

  I arrive, realizing that there is very little of him left there. All that remains is one intimate allée, designed by Le Notre for a porcelain playhouse.

  The whole geography has moved smoothly into another time.

  And there is not a sign of me. The Trianon de Porcelaine is broken. I remain in a neutral room on the north side of the palace, fading into crowds of courtiers.

  Walking back towards the palace I have to face the wind. It is almost dark.

  EVIDENCE

  There were traces

  there was evidence

  the room moved in to

  hold it

  like a dark gold frame

  we staggered round like saints

  tiny ships sailed at our heels

  lilies came to light

  all evidence

  the letter on the table

  the ashes in the grate

  until the day the dove

  emerged

  silent from your mouth

  LE ROI S’AMUSE

  The man who touches you

  without love

  arrives in a golden coach

  drawn by a purebred horse

  he carries his hands to you

  like old sorrows

  he is the death

  of the child in you

  the beginning of dark

  there are no more songs

  from the rooms

  he moves through

  the mouth he puts to yours

  contains a brutal statement

  your limbs become machinery

  to the limits he enforces

  he doesn’t lure you into

  altered landscapes

  keeps his time in

  artificial daylight

  speaking solid words

  and the last glimpse of

  his sail on the horizon

  never finishes

  the stones that felt his step

  the sea the bed that you return to

  all remember him

  his breath remains

  forever at your throat

  reme
mber him

  THE VERMILION BOX

  Poison comes in phials filled with liquids, or packets filled with powders. It can be eaten, drunk, injected, or absorbed through the skin. Choose the scent. Often it is disguised as perfume.

  Madame de Montespan, not yet old, but fat from too many babies, registers extreme disapproval. The King is slinking secretly off to other beds. She wants to perfume the Venetian lace at his throat. She wants to powder his wig.

  No more aphrodisiacs. She administers them. He moves like a magnet to the iron charms of Madame de Fontagnes. She wants to sweeten that lady’s tea, colour her eau de cologne.

  Arsenic, opium, antimony, hemlock. Sitting alone in her rooms she shakes her head slightly. Red sulphur, bat’s blood dried dust of moles, yellow sulphur.

  Poison, a ritual extending from her body. The chalice rests on her stomach, her breasts fall away from her ribcage. It is the older woman, more wrinkled than herself. She whispers incantations and recipes into her ears. The younger one offers her flesh, like ripe fruit for the appetite of some darker power.

  Iron filings, resin of dried plums.

  She is falling, falling from favour. She hates him. She loves him. She sees him dead, surrounded by satin then safe in the tomb. Her poison trapped in his body like sperm in a uterus.

  During the ceremony she spells his name backwards on her inner thigh in donkey’s blood. She spells his name forwards with some of her own. Someone saves the knife for a Baroque Forensic lab.

  Decades later she pays four young women to remain in her room from nightfall to dawn. At her request they play cards and drink wine for ten dark hours. They laugh, gossip, while she hides behind the velvet curtains remembering the poison that perfumed her dreams.