Some Other Garden (3 page)

    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.

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 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 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

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.

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

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

remember him

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.

    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.

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

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 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

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.