Some Other Garden (2 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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 passing 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
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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 him 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

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.