Still Life in Landscape

The poem’s title invokes a different medium—painting—and sets the expectation of a display arranged to spark a particular emotion in the viewer. In this poem, the reader becomes the viewer, and the tableau of the “still life” comes into view as the speaker’s memory unfolds. In painting, the term “still life” typically refers to depictions of inanimate objects. The original French term nature morte translates literally to “dead nature.”

The poem opens in a wide view, setting the visual landscape before narrowing like a funnel toward the central image. The reader learns the broad scene first: night, with rain. Car parts “and / half-cars” constitute the first objects in view (Lines 1-2). The poem’s formal qualities imitate the action represented; even the line break accents the brokenness of the crashed vehicles.

The speaker momentarily pulls back again in the second line; after identifying the vehicles themselves, she comments “it was still, and bright” (Line 2). While “still” recalls the title, the double meaning isn’t yet apparent: motionless and dead. Though the first line presents night, the second line’s “bright” brackets the first two lines with the rhyme and opposing meanings of “night” and “bright” (Lines 1-2).

When the body appears in Line 3, the speaker slips into an investigative role and tone, as if the description might be part of a detailed report. Four lines examine the body’s disposition on the highway. The speaker explains the unnatural way the woman’s head bends all the way back to touch her spine “between her shoulder-blades” (Line 6), allowing the condition of the body to report death to the reader.

These lines’ diction, however, humanizes the remains. In Line 3, the speaker describes “a woman […] lying on the highway,” and the reader is momentarily unaware the woman has died. The narration is in past tense; the speaker already knows, but recalls the process of her realization. Moving from Line 3 to 4, the body’s position shows the violence of the accident: “with her head curled back and tucked under her shoulders” (Line 4). The words “curled” and “tucked,” especially about her head, call up images of hair arrangement, especially a 1950s careful set that might actually have been tucked about a woman’s shoulders.

Line 5 clarifies the horror and the unnatural form. The speaker confirms the head bends back far enough to meet the spine between the shoulder-blades (Lines 5-6), then turns to the woman’s clothing. The next line presents the first direct use of the word “accident,” transformed to a verb and ultimately to an adjective describing the clothing: “mostly accidented off” (Line 7). This linguistic maneuver—the rapid shift from noun to verb to adjective—creates a combined sense of disruption and momentum.

Line 8 further emphasizes violence through a tongue twister of cross-alliteration and assonance. The concentrated sounds of “leg gone, a long bone” (Line 8) associatively jumble to “long gone”; “long bone” compresses to “lone.” Grief emerges most acutely in this shortest line of the poem. Alliteration then propels the graphic horror of the next line, “sticking out of the stub of her thigh—” (Line 9). This visual “stick” of the em dash separates the first section of the poem—the description of the “still life”—from the ensuing expanded imaginative scope wherein the speaker moves her attention from the physical to the metaphysical, wrestling with the sudden divorce between body and spirit.

This element of the metaphysical—of abstraction—emerges in Line 10’s gesture at the preceding descriptive lines, collecting and classifying them. The repeated “her” emphasizes a moment of revelation and an attempt to reconcile human identity with the inanimate remnants that the speaker calls “her abandoned matter” (Line 10); not only does the scientific tone emphasize, through understatement, the gruesomeness of its object, but the sterile language accentuates the contrast between the corpse’s lifelessness and its former, animated personhood. As the speaker struggles to reconcile this reality—this “abandoned matter” (Line 10)—with her understanding of the world, her mother physically turns her away from the scene (Lines 11-13), absorbing her child back into her body to protect her from this realization.

The speaker’s physical movement, the turn of her head, has manifold signification: It echoes the contortion of the body on the highway (“with her head curled back and tucked under her shoulders”) (Line 4), but it also signals a movement to safety. The poet arranges the narrative like a painter arranging the tableau in a still life: One side’s shapes and movement balance the corresponding shapes and movement on the other. Moreover, the turn of the speaker’s head indicates a turn in perspective, as Line 13 begins a description of the family’s disposition in relation to the accident.

The speaker again adopts a dispassionate investigative tone in Line 13: her father “was driving” but “not sober,” and yet he was “not in this accident” (Lines 13-14). Such specificity—not “this” accident (Line 14)—has later ramifications. For now, however, despite her father’s drunkenness, the family comes to the scene “out of neutral twilight” (Line 15), blameless in this moment. From a distance, the speaker saw beauty in the twinkle of the debris, particles of glass shining against pavement “like an underlying / midnight abristle with stars” (Lines 16-17). The scenic impression exudes beauty, if the poet momentarily effaces the stark reality. The poem thus emulates still life paintings of animal carcasses or butchery among flowers and banqueting tables; the composition simulates harmony and seemliness despite the individual elements’ grotesque nature.

In Line 10, the speaker defines the parameters of “her,” the “abandoned matter” of the victim (Line 10). In parallel language, Line 17 frames a larger, metaphysical panorama: “This was / the world—maybe the only one” (Lines 17-18). In addition to the line’s allusion to an afterlife, the “maybe” marks a shift from reporting to questioning. The speaker forms a theory in the last lines of the poem, integrating the visual of the accident with elements of her own history. Facts define the world in some ways—the woman in the accident met her death at someone else’s hand, but the speaker’s father also nearly hit another person who “leapt away” (Line 21) from the car, “jerking back from death” (Line 22)—a death in which the speaker may feel complicit as a passenger in the vehicle.

The speaker further speculates, organizing the details of her account in the final lines, where possibilities are eliminated: the dead woman is “not I,” and “not my mother” (Line 23). She poses a function for the dead woman, “model of the mortal” (Line 24), the tableau’s focal point. Like a still life, the other objects sit about the corpse, the focus, both in the speaker’s vision and the poet’s narrative composition. Through the speaker, the reader observes the signs: “glass, bone, metal, flesh, and the family” (Line 26). The final line places the family outside the speaker; she becomes a distant observer, seeing her family as part of the tableau, a story that ends in a death.