Terri Brown-Davidson – Ⅱ

My Mother’s Mind: A Sonnet 

 

 

 

 

 

“I can’t meditate anymore,” my mother says. “My mind, lizard-like, skitters

and feints when I try to calm it.” I stare at her sere pale face,

slide quietly into her eyes.

It’s dark yet glitters with murk, a landscape littered

with red and gold leaves that float then cling to my bare

cold feet as I wander through the forest of my mother’s silent mind,

its fir trees wafting an intangible needled scent,

its foliage unfurling, climbing,

developing in bursts of gold-dappled light dimmed

to shadows that lengthen, darken, turn black

as the moist loamy earth squeezing up between my toes.

In the landscapes we inhabit, everything cracks,

disintegrates: twig and branch. Ash and bone. Everything goes

dead and rotten inside the mind

except the tiny orange light that flickers there still

after my mother and I are gone.