Asphodel

by Jane Craven
 
 
In the time of her great undoing
particles of stars—silent and relentless— 
burrowed inside my mother’s head. The world 
 
became a shivering thing, tree line
vibrating against the sky, emerging bruise of sunlight. She knew not—
she knew 
 
not the splendid
crevasse that peeled open in her brain, 
river of fire—this wasting—this new world
 
so absent the other world 
with its dead endings—fresh murals on condemned buildings.
 
She was tragic and unaware of tragedy— knew only the maze 
of the facility in which she was entombed, 
 
wandering—her head heavy and foreign.
I remember when she was whole 
remember her loves—long drives in the country—
 
dirt roads then.  On a hot summer day, we stopped at a sandy tobacco field 
where a farmer had assembled sharecropper shacks 
in the false shape of a village. 
 
They were full of antique clocks, and a loud off-kilter wind of tick-tocks 
startled as we opened each door. 
I watched as she, delicately, with both hands, 
 
fed a giant sun-like disc into a music box 
that plucked out Lucia di Lammermoor with its metal teeth
Si schiuda il ciel per me
 
heaven opens for me
sings of flowers, and a door swings wide 
onto cloudless night.