She thinks of the still, warm, dead heart of a pigeon, housed in a vermilion box, said to have power, but useless without the bird itself, without flight. Finally it had bloated, become putrid, had to be disposed of along with the box that held it.
Beyond the curtains the women discuss their lovers in the warm glow of the candles. Their smooth hands finger the cards nervously.
Madame de Montespan closes the lid on the poison.
HORSES
In fields that unfurl to
the left of the garden
twelve grey horses
ease into canter
their loins adjust to
the three-beat rhythm
breaking like thunder
deep in the forest
flashing by branches
trampling moss
I never see them
here in this dream where
I’m pacing my limbs to
the nod of the trainer
here in this dream
educated muscle
covers the length of
my bones
I remember
clouds of rhythm
surrounding the palace
his step on the stair
his key in the lock
the supple behaviour
the hunt and the harness
unyielding
THE YEARS DEPARTING
Coaches departing
are the years pulling away
stern their private latches
closed on cool compartments
once I wept the distance
remembering the pressure
limb on limb
and the landscape outside
ringing like time
you coasting from my view
from balconies I have seen
you coast from my view
I have seen you hunched
like a thief over the wheel
of the months turning
another year towards closure
the inevitable closure
quiet click
of the door’s latch
how I bolt it afterwards
the metal hard against my hand
THE POISONED SHIRT
The poison is absorbed
into the meat of his back
the muscle
I want it to travel
nerves sinews
chords of tissue
to answer the pluck of pain
I want to kill from without
the whole man
his body absorbing the entire
corruption
a final message from
blood to brain
until it bubbles away
the last sentence
frozen in his eyes
and me answering
Glass Coffins
It was not wise to leave so precious a relic in an undefended place outside the walls of town … because in those days a saint’s body was esteemed more than a treasure.
– The Little Flowers of Saint Clare
ANONYMOUS JOURNAL
During this long winter we rarely go outside, though it is seldom warmer in our rooms. The interior of the palace has become a condensed winter world – cold mirrors, frozen chandeliers. Our fogged breath precedes us everywhere, softening candelabra and fresco.
It is as if the garden has completely disappeared. We can hear the wind and the groaning of the giant trees. But we never see outside. Thousands of window panes are covered by a thick frost.
There are no more gold settings at the table. Too much warmth in the cutlery is ridiculous. Soon the silver will disappear as well, reducing us to crockery.
It is February and we are surprised by a miraculous sun. He insists that we move outdoors, walk in his white garden. We don’t object, put on our cloaks and boots, leave rooms for the first time in months.
At first we are overcome by endless snow and the shock of the first cold swallow of air, fresh on the tissues of our lungs. But when we can see again we are amazed by the unbroken surface of white and the open blue of the sky. The ground plan of the garden is erased by winter.
The statues are confused, awkward under hats and epaulets of snow. Urns grow ice. Our steps are new marks, making new boundaries.
We move towards the Bassin D’Apollon, watching as the metal forms take shape against white. We are able to pick out the four horses, the sea monster, the torso of the young god emerging from his chariot. The wind has swept all the snow away from the Bassin, revealing enclosed ice, thick as marble. The sculpture is now locked, changed completely, made impotent by ice.
He, standing there looking at this, understands for the first time that all his monuments are immovable, frozen in their own time. They are like novelties on display, already under glass.
The Sun God and his Chariot, powerless in a cold, cold season.
The light, the wind, revealing all of this. Making the image totally clear. And totally brutal.
WINTER OF 1709
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
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
SILENCED
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
LADY REASON
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
ONE MEMORY OF OPENING
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
DOCTOR FAGON
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.
Earthworms against gout.
Bees’ ashes to make hair grow.
Ant oil against deafness.
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.
GLASS COFFINS
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.
HALL OF MIRRORS
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
II.
ELEVEN POEMS FOR LE NOTRE
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
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
II
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
III
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
IV
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
V
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
VI
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
VII
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