Some Other Garden

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

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
bright incisions
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

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.

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
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

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

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 watching

the other worlds have
vanished

in the morning
we’re unable to see

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.

    Sometimes at night they dream that their bloodstreams have become canals, moving outwards, to the sea. Their lost city, carried here inside the prison of their bodies.

    They’ve forgotten the songs they used to sing.

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

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