Adrienne Rich - The Corpse-Plant lyrics

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 it's first essentials
In some hot cradle-tomb of time
I felt my body slipping through
The fingers of it's 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 it'self, 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 it'self out

Under the radiance of the milk-glass shade
Only death’s insect whiteness
Crooks it's neck in a tumbler
Where I placed it's sign by choice