Milkweed Pod: A Still Life

Though the photo shows its opened pod looking like a feathered vessel adrift in a watery abyss, I know milkweed usually grows along the dry edges of fields. In late summer the pods cling to their stalks. Packed inside each one of them lie a hundred or more seeds waiting in the dark, each with its own white tassel from which derived the seed’s common name: silk fish.

Seeds still in their pods are fuss-less. They have no use for butterfly or bee, which are a blossom’s only way to have a future. They have no interest in beauty or fragrance, which cannot summon what they need now: light wind, animal fur, or the pants-leg of a passing hiker.

Once, late in the summer my beloved died, I wandered slowly between forest and field, and it seemed as if some kind of phantasmagoric deluge of seeds were cascading from goat’s-rue and thistle, from aster and bindweed. Stand here and be seed-showered, I whispered to myself. Maybe this is the ablution after death. You walk in the woods. You walk in the fields. You are wet with them or dry-sprinkled. They bounce off your shoulders, pile up on your boots. This is how you spend your mourning.

The bounty, though, was the forest’s, the field’s, not mine.

In October the milkweed pod, both nest and next, begins its first and final letting go. Temperatures drop; the pod dries up; the seam on its outer side begins to split. Exposed to air and rain, the silky filaments unfasten themselves; the seeds are lifted and strewn by any bit of breeze.

And now in November, after the bustle of dispersion, here is this splayed-open milkweed pod, a broken, ghostly container, which has just been emptied.

Autumn is the season of wreckage: slit pods, split husks, the spent cones of cucumber trees, white residue of the milkweed tassels also known as coma. Something about this debris after lift-off/drop-off quickens my spirits—the sudden coalescing around what has just disappeared, the hard luminosity of last moments before the final fling into the ongoing, ceaseless flow of the world as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen.

But a single seed knows nothing about profusion: Only a small percentage of seeds in the wild ever make it. The rest dry up on inhospitable landing sites: stone, dry soil, the collar of my sweatshirt. What to make of so many dead ends—including, eventually, our own—that lie barely visible all around us? How to resist the likely gloom that ensues?

Milkweeds are best known as the plant the caterpillar of the monarch butterfly must feed on. Say “milkweed” and most people picture the monarchs in mass migrations to Mexico, the orangey, banner-like swaths that flutter overhead and remind us of the miracle of their flight. Not me, at least not now. I’m more interested in what remains once the monarchs are gone, whether the plant itself will die or re-seed or push another shoot from its rhizomic tangle beneath the ground.

When I try to sketch this emptied pod of a milkweed plant, I end up with drawings of alabaster canoes, cupped hands on the verge of clasping, a broken egg resealing itself, and suddenly that’s me I’m drawing, a charcoal figure curled under the dome of heaven as it lowers and becomes a closing casket lid.

In another drawing, this pod is a discarded chalice tipped on its side and stripped of ripe seed, meaning I’m also obsessed with the remnants of release.

This, my love, is how grief happens: the milkweed pod unfolds its emptiness, an image which contradicts itself, subverts its own claim, which is how I’m learning to live without you.  

Photo credit: Adam M. Wilson

Barbara Hurd is the author of The Epilogues (Standing Stone Books 2021) and five other books on the human/natural world. Read more.


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