Some Other Garden Read Free Page A

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