The latest in a semi-regular series that breaks down a poem to analyse what it’s really trying to tell us.

Megan Kitching won the Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry (best first book award) in this year’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. But I’d heard about her poetry long before that. Her collection – At the Point of Seeing – is a wonder-filled immersion in nature. But not the wilds: it’s the close, domestic variety of nature that draws Kitching’s exceptional eye. The result is a startling and intimate series of revelations that build, line-by-line, a relationship between the narrator and their daily environment. 

I chose this poem to read closely because there’s an underlying humour that is charming but also eerie. It reminded me of the way houseplant ownership boomed during the pandemic as we sought distraction and turned our focus to the domestic; and those articles about how millennials are obsessed with them. As I read this poem I couldn’t help but think of Little Shop of Horrors, and my own aversion to houseplants on account of a suspicion that they would be happier outside, growing beyond the rim of the pot, getting all the sun and rain they want, listening to the birds.

I also love this poem because houseplants are ubiquitous which makes turning a poetic focus on them an adventure: what can be said about houseplants that feels new and revelatory? 

Let’s find out.

Houseplants by Megan Kitching

The fern fronds its dinky table, epiphyllum sprawls in a chair
pulled up to the window. The aspidistra has the floor.
The plants of this lounge are sturdy with abiding; they sit
astride the banal hours and feed like mussels on any
light that washes in. When you come home some are waxen,
tight-lipped, admonitory. Others are curved, coy, uplifted in a wave
yet unmoved: your whatever mood like your talk merely
brushes past, a puzzling draught. The plants have engaged
this room for a long smoke of a dusty thought. You catch
the murmur of their wry, cross-stemmed turning round the pot.
Stymied at times, stunted at the tongue for missing the water
you dole out but tending to love whenever sun sidles over.
How it mottles leaves to blush, raises their pitch of bristling
stillness until time drips from their epidermis sweet as liquorice.

Reading notes:

The fern fronds its dinky table, epiphyllum sprawls in a chair
pulled up to the window. The aspidistra has the floor.

Within the first three words we have a stunning twist: the word “fronds” is used as a verb. “The fern fronds its dinky table”: it sounds cheeky, with the word “dinky” inspiring a vision of a low formica coffee table; and the word “frond” sounding a bit like “fondle”. The word “epiphyllum” though, lands us firmly in the world of the plant. Somehow the latin name (for Orchard Cacti, so Google tells me) rings serious, gives it that label of “science”. Only that too is upended with “sprawls in a chair pulled up to the window”. Crikey, this is brilliant: who pulled the chair up to the window? The epiphyllum? All of this gives the image of a cheeky fern, and a pining (?) or disaffected (sprawling, gazing out the window to the outside?) epiphyllum.

“The aspidistra has the floor,” ends this first couplet with a grand statement: is the aspidistra about to speak? Is it lecturing the fern and the cacti? What are these plants up to?

The plants of this lounge are sturdy with abiding; they sit astride the banal hours and feed like mussels on any light that washes in. 

Here the view zooms out as the voice of the narrator tells us more about the state of these characters: they are “sturdy with abiding”. A curious phrase! It sounds like Stoicism: that the plants are resigned to waiting, existing where they are put. Then more: “they sit astride the banal hours” – this gives the plant-characters will, and dominance. They own the long hours, riding them like time bandits. At this stage we still don’t know what they’re waiting for, what might break this banality. But we’re given this incredible image: “and feed like mussels on any light that washes in.” I love this so much. It tilts the world until houseplants slide into the sea: that static, waiting state is far from inactive. All the time they’re sucking what they can out of the world around them. They feed on the light like shellfish sieve the sea, even as they appear so motionless, and so stuck.

When you come home some are waxen, tight-lipped, admonitory. Others are curved, coy, uplifted in a wave yet unmoved: your whatever mood like your talk merely brushes past, a puzzling draught. 

A ha. Here we have the suspected re-entry. The plants are sulking. For some reason this makes me think of the mother in the Cat in the Hat: those scenes where she’s on the threshold of the house, about to step back into a her home, oblivious to the chaos that’s gone on there (the cat in the hat causing mayhem for the two kids left home alone with the long-suffering goldfish). The beauty of this is the irony. We’ve been let into the life of the lonely, bored plants so we know they’ve been fronding, and sprawling and maybe even dragging chairs to windows. But the “you” of the poem enters into the aftermath to greet them “waxen”, “tight-lipped,” and “admonitory”. The plants are infused with deeply human states of being which heightens the drama, makes it relatable, but also makes it awkwardly funny, too. Funny because the idea of plants sulking while you’re out is funny; awkward because if they can sulk, perceive absence and get bored, then what else are they capable of? 

The plants have engaged this room for a long smoke of a dusty thought. 

This line is chef’s kiss. Just wow. “A long smoke of dusty thought” evokes a trio of disaffected characters, lingering in the close air of the room, ruminating. Moody, atmospheric, filmic. The word “engaged” is just perfect: unusual and yet so right. The plants have changed the atmosphere of the room with their wiltings and tickles and sprawls. 

You catch the murmur of their wry, cross-stemmed turning round the pot. Stymied at times, stunted at the tongue for missing the water you dole out but tending to love whenever sun sidles over.

Here our sense of hearing is engaged with the word “murmur”. We’ve suspected by now that these plants might speak as well as display human attitudes. This is the set of lines that satisfy and extend the anthropomorphism (applying human traits to non-human things). But it’s subtle and gentle. There’s a sense of a relationship between human carer and plant: “stunted at the tongue for missing the water you dole out”. A person watering a plant is exactly we think when we think about houseplants, but in this poem it’s about the experience for the plant (not enough water renders the plant less articulate). The line “but tending to love whenever sun sidles over” captures the slide of sunlight over a room as the day goes on, and how much the plant’s behaviour changes when it gets a fix of photosynthesis.

How it mottles leaves to blush, raises their pitch of bristling stillness until time drips from their epidermis sweet as liquorice.

These final lines are so precise they explode the poem out: the same way that a microscope explodes tiny matter into enormity. “How it mottles leaves to blush”: in my reading I apply the sun to the “it” as this sentence is an extension of the one before. So the meaning I make is: “how the sunlight mottles leaves to blush”. I might be wrong, but to me it makes sense of the mottling and blushing: light changes the way something looks, it can pick up variations in colour and the heat causes blushing. But here, as we’ve come to expect, this idea is pushed beyond vision and into sound, too: “raises their pitch of bristling stillness”. The sun hitting the plants intensifies that state of active inactivity (like the earlier “feed like muscles”) so much that it is sensed as an absence of sound, a heavy, moody silence.

The final fragment is the explosive part: “until time drips from their epidermis sweet as liquorice”. Now, what can that mean? I think this is about leaves falling, fronds degrading until they peel. The reason is: a classic symbol of time is the autumnal drop of leaves. But this is of course not restricted to outside trees. Our indoor plants mark time every day as leaves curl, colour and drop; or fronds wilt and colour. The “sweet as liquorice” is another surprise and one that brings in the sense of taste which completes the multi-sensory experience of this poem. Liquorice is associated with dark colours and roots (it’s the root of the plant that gets used) as well as with sweetness. So all together there’s a sense of time passing sweetly, without bitterness: that the cycle of time as witnessed in the shifting state of the houseplants is a comfort, a treat.

A final fun exercise for this beautiful, startling poem is to read the last word of every line: “Chair floor, sit any waxen, wave merely engaged catch pot. water, over. bristling liquorice.” Like another hidden world: an abstract portrait of a room.

At the Point of Seeing (Otago University Press, $25) is available from Unity Books Wellington and Auckland.