At the same time, the speaker identifies herself with the flowers by saying that she is “at home here among the dead heads” (7). Interestingly, by disclosing that she is both a flower and an agent of the flowers’ destruction, she reveals that she is a self-destroyer. She says, “Let me sit in a flowerpot, / The spiders won’t notice. / My heart is a stopped geranium” (7-10). In these lines, the speaker performs a complicated feat of identification. She projects herself into the flowers, the flowers into herself, and then, as her final act, she transports this bizarre human-flower hybrid (of which she is, of course, a part) into death. Moreover, she fuses the human and the floral so completely that she describes her heart as a flower that has ceased to beat, a “stopped geranium.”

She strives to reinforce her communion with the flowers by calling out to them: “Moldering heads console me, / Nailed to the rafters yesterday:/ Inmates who don’t hibernate” (14-16). She has established this communion so completely that it is difficult to ascertain whether that which was “nailed to the rafters” belonged to the speaker or to the “moldering heads” of the flowers. Regardless, this “nailing” recalls a crucifixion, which necessarily conjures the image of a rebirth.

In the fifth section, “Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond,” the speaker declares: “molts are tongueless that sang from above the water/ Of Golgotha at the tip of a reed, / And how a god flimsy as a baby’s finger/ Shall unhusk himself and steer into the air” (17-20). In these lines, the speaker looks back on the locus of Jesus’s crucifixion (“Golgotha”); but, remarkably, through her use of the word “shall,” she establishes a sense of anticipation — that the reemergence of the god is yet to come. She envisions the resurrection as a sort of peeling off of organic layers (an unhusking) that will allow the fragile god figure to take to the skies. In this way, the speaker establishes that she has reached a sort of emotional wasteland and is at the brink of a metamorphosis.

The speaker then introduces the ostensible impetus for her transformation — love, as represented by the poem’s mother figure that continuously rejects the beseeching speaker. Yet the protagonist continues to call out: “Mother, you are the one mouth/ I would be a tongue to. Mother of otherness/ Eat me” (26-28). This “mother of otherness” seems to be both a symbol of the speaker’s longing to be accepted in her “otherness” — her strangeness that separates her from others — and a desire to rid herself of that “otherness” by fusing with the mother figure.

Article Author: Caroline Hagood

Caroline Hagood is a poet, writer and full-time book, movie and blog maniac. Her poetry and articles have appeared in various publications and she blogs at the Huffington Post, Culture Sandwich, and Film Catcher.

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