Some Other Garden (4 page)

You rearrange the lace
at your wrist with cold fingers
the freeze deepens

hens are laying frozen eggs
behind the kitchen garden
blossoms are trapped in the false
promise of tubers

cold days
the last time
I wore this cloak against
the weather I noticed

how velvet remains unaffected
by the breeze   fades only
when the sun touches it
over and over

the sun no longer reaches me
the colour of this cold
is permanent
when trees become cathedral
bones over our heads

you add another acre
to the dormant garden
ice silvers steps and paths
and fountains

your finger prints
on everything you touch

Autumn
false gold falling on actuality
stone walls all around

summer hid the prison
the perfect palace
draped in green and growing
overtop the stairs

winter now
and every word is opened
syllables ride to the horizon
in the grim hands of the post

false gold covers gravel
nothing hides in green

this palace
this prison

built in time
to silence
every loss I speak

Emotionally
I am not yet ready for
Madame de Maintenon

Your Solidity
he calls her    or
Lady Reason

she answering
Majesty
Majesty

he bows
to the superior religion
she holds up a mirror to
his crime

his passion
the vanity of wars
and women won

landscapes pillaged

Lady Reason
Lady Reason
you move in a different realm

pulling out the power of
the lust of a King

his will to control
the world
himself

I am not ready for you

I am still
running through crooked
paths in my imagination

With nothing to hold
I remember open windows
a garden or lake beyond
you holding me

how our clothing opened
and closed again    like windows
the night or light entering
us pouring out

surely there is more than this
one memory of opening
the breeze from the world
around us    a sail on the lake
crowds waiting on the shore

wind on my sleeve
a sail suddenly pregnant
the ease with which
we fell together then
and fell apart

We reason with one another, he prescribes the remedies, I omit to take them and I recover.
Molière

Doctor Fagon killed them all. I saw his window the other day, filled with blades. Enormous scissors intersecting the rectangle.
And knives, knives
.

    Doctor Fagon enters the chamber in a brown cloak. He bleeds the Queen. Laundresses delight in sheets stained royally red.

    Doctor Fagon performs his operations by the light of a thousand candles. Muscles, soft to the scalpel, open over royal bone. The silversmiths are busy building reliquaries all across the country.

Doctor Fagon senses hidden smallpox deep in the palace. He administers emetics. Three princes vomit their way to heaven. The iron heart of a King breaks open in the carriage on the way to Marly.

    Doctor Fagon mixes powders long into the night. He rebukes those that avoid him, accuses them of impiety. Museums prepare for his mortar and pestle.

    
He prepares for the King.

    Doctor Fagon broods over Burgundy wine. He doses the King with spirit of amber, rubs his left leg with hot cloths, wraps the royal limbs in linen soaked in brandy.

    Eventually the pain evaporates. It leaves the palace by the back door, hovers somewhere east of the Grand Canal.

    Doctor Fagon cures the King.
The King is dead
.

The women longed for glass coffins. They imagined that centuries later men would file by to wonder at their incorrupt flesh. They were also interested in satin pillows and narrow couches. I know that is true. One told me so herself.

    Glass coffins. Like the one the friars built around the body of Saint Clare. Like the one that dwarfs placed Snow White in. And these women
had
been kissed and kissed by their prince.

    Often the women chose their costumes for the sake of glass coffins. They knew their fabric held together longest.

    They arranged their hair in deathless styles.

    Between the covers, under the glass, their bodies shine.

Overhead the crystal hangs
handfuls of tears
in placid air

the mirrors divide
my body darkens
waiting in the hall

see me in the glass
reflected
see me in the glass
abandoned

I am walking back and forth
in a dream
never changing
my costume or my mind

I am blind
from staring too long at the sun

the scent of a King
is still in my hair

In the gardens the King never says outright “Do not accompany me.” When you meet him he halts and if he bows after saying a few words you must walk on. If he wishes you to stay, he asks you to walk with him. Otherwise you simply can’t
.

– Duchesse D’Orleans

Princes were in the moral world what monsters were in the physical; we saw openly in them the vices that are unseen in other men
.

– Duchesse Du Maine

I was walking in the garden of his imaginary palace
he had chosen silence and indefinite vacations
there was nothing to clean up afterwards

except the season
which shed its possibilities all along the pathways
and the horizon
which carried sails of ships I had not visited
as I was walking

                       in the garden of his imaginary
palace planting episodes and confrontations
bits of history for fine dust
and despite the promise of my delicate rehearsals
despite the maps that he’d proved true to scale
all that lay beneath the surface of the soil
I’d come to alter
was a river of thickened ink

and it appeared that over and over
I had a black thumb

His position
                 mine
a crazy axiom of linear perspective
the function of that garden

                                            painters stoop to it
as if the world were solid    architectural
but colour softens up their distances
green emptying to blue

                                    no colour there
we walked    kept to the walls when possible
expecting that predictable geometry would save us
in the end from paths of intersection

and then events became confused degrees of angles
something we intended did not flex
broke through the surfaces of diagrams and entered
structure

               so that even now
two hundred well placed orange trees lead off
to nowhere    bulbs pulsing underground anticipate
survival

               we’re stopped here    frozen
to the marble of the balustrade

where vanishing points
beckon

Before I came to move again
this man prepared to organize
restrain the landscape
                                a simple act
of laying hold of paper pencil ruler
a protractor

and clumsy shovels
projecting from the end of several brown arms
no complex survey tools the paths he chose were
marked by hand with chalk
or maybe twisted ribbon

back to design the    arrows on the paper which follow
to the target of translation
they projected from the eye and then the arm
of what would seem a softer individual but
long before the workmen bent to turn aside
the first inch of the earth
  design had settled
hard in this man’s head

more like concrete
than a garden

Thresholds existed
and I might have voyaged out at any moment
past the rusted cage of gates
                                          and into

intense disorder

instead I walked for months around
ambitious cultivation  aware of intervals of timber
and of fountains    the scrape of rake against
a thousand pebbles
the dull insistent questions of the statues

and when his smile exposed the iron teeth
of garden tools
I felt the silver of the thresholds glisten
out to me

but I was captured by his will   the formal garden
and welded too by indecision
to the holy taste of ash
around his mouth

In winter trees exploded up against the sky
like black fireworks
                             they touched
to make the tunnels that I moved through

the sun is gone I thought until I captured its reflection
in the dirty water of canals
                                        and then I took it
in my eyes and held it there
the after image burning permanent diamonds
on the folds inside my brain

these were the personal adornments
that I carried with me always
always
so I could not see around them or beyond them
could not see beyond them

                                         out to the shadow
of another burning image
                                      he
walking unescorted through the garden
half a mile away

Dust on satin
the soft hems of my clothing

and I believed it pleasant to carry something
of the garden to my wardrobe
                                             like silver powder drawn

to me by some remote
magician
             pleasanter let’s say
than stunted vegetation

reality made dirt of it of course
and quickly cleaned it from the tissue of my skirts
the brass and bristle of the clothes brush
in the cool hands of the servants
their motions so deliberate
                                         and so angry

it was the way they disapproved of me that brushed aside
the traces of peculiar recreations
the way they disapproved of subtle dust
on satin
           and all those mornings that I emptied
free of time

                      walking walking walking
                      in that foolish garden

Spring was worst
a little wind would settle in
warm moist disorganized
pushing line away from the clutch of centre
tossing back the gathered skirts
of unchecked form
and overlooking the importance of security
and then ignoring the obvious yellow
of old well draughted plans

his plans

serenely twisted in the ugly shape
of pollarded trees or frozen
in the ridiculous gestures of the statues
until a little wind nudged ice aside and introduced
a growth to other
than his plans

                      that was the season he
attacked the garden like a furious disease
working it with weapons from his wheelbarrow
cutting back
cutting back until like every other thing
he ever showed me

                               spring
and that glorious garden
                                    were entirely

in his power

Frost all over the garden softening green to grey
scale the day he returned there was frost all

over the garden and an onion skin of ice on the
discontinued fountains

he returned riding his horse with the glass eyes
riding him
needing no blinkers to camouflage his blindnesses

and all that white frost cancelling colour once again
except for

                     the black of his thoughtless re entry
                     and the blue of our cold celebrations

On summer evenings they roll out from a man’s feet
until the fading out of light

                                          glued
to the flatness of the ground
like rich shaped beds of earth
they glide past the mockery of monuments
and approach his architectural repertoire

where
    finding walls
they bend in improbable locations
mid thigh or straight across the rib cage
forming new pliable joints for his confident
anatomy

                     the shadow illustrates the man
submissive    curving when he least expects
to the fact of his own authority

long cast shadows
draughting out the spirit of the man
to the fawning shape of a bow
and he is broken

                             in the custody
of his own enforced obedience

Someone down the hall was working on his monument
I was riding like a sunset on the edge
of altered landscape
this proves I never was his widow

the rasping cough of chisel on the marble
created thirty feathers for the left wing of an angel
the jewellery he gave me was sliding to my knuckles
well cut stones of hot intended blood

technicians for his tomb arrived in numbers
to offer praise and redesign
his life for him their manners were dramatic
and assured the same as all his other false
invented memories