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
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.