Adrienne Rich — The Corpse-Plant

A milk-glass bowl hanging by three chains from the discoloured ceiling is beautiful tonight. On the floor, leaves, crayons, innocent dust foregather. Neither obedient nor sick, I turn my head feeling the weight of a thick gold ring in either lobe. I see the corpse-plants clustered in a hobnailed tumbler at my elbow, white as death, I’d say if I’d ever seen death; whiter than life, at all events, next to my summer-stained hand. Is it in the sun that truth begins? Lying under that battering light the first few hours of summer I felt scraped clean, washed down to ignorance. The gold in my ears, souvenir of a wicked old city, might have been wearing thin as wires found in the ears of a woman’s head miraculously kept in its first essentials in some hot cradle-tomb of time. I felt my body slipping through the fingers of its mind. Later, I slid on wet roots, threw my shoes across a brook, waded on algae-furred stones to join them. That day it was I found the corpse-plants, growing like shadows on a negative in the chill of fern and lichen-rust. That day for the first time I gave them their deathly names— or did they name themselves?— not “Indian-pipes” as once we children called them. Tonight, an August night, feeling the apples yellow as young moons on the tree behind the house, I think of my winter— all my winters, of mind and of flesh, the wet undercover I’ve grubbed at, sick with the rot-smell of leaves black as silt and heavy as tarpaulin, obedient as the elevator cage lowering itself, crank by crank into the mine-pit, forced labor hopelessly renewed— but the horror is dimmed: like the negative of one intolerable photograph it barely sorts itself out under the radiance of the milk-glass shade. Only death’s insect whiteness crooks its neck in a tumbler where I placed its sign by choice.