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
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.
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