Free Some Other Garden by Jane Urquhart

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 thedistance 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
    you are a circle of light
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