Anamnesis

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“A beam of light will fill your head,
and you’ll remember what’s been said
by all the good men this world’s ever known.”
— The Moody Blues

Sleeping under stars
on a ledge above the rille,
remembering flash flood warnings

and flashing back to a dear,
young physicist friend,
her ground effect vehicle

caught between a hillside
and Thor’s Mjolnir, a murder
of waterborne boulders

only a hill could stop,
her body monolayered
in calendered metal,

her spirit freed faster
than sylphs on the wind,
I dreamt a desert dream.

Too long away on other worlds,
the two of us returned
to a moonless Earth

no longer blue,
a surprise in burnt sienna.
Our bubble came to rest

in a scatter of gravel
and skittering lizards, sublimed
with a flash of schlieren.

We somehow knew that moondust				
had buried the pyramids
and all of Nanga Parbat,

the Everest beacon remaining
a lamasery of light.
Datura desolation

filled the world,
the devil’s weed of brujos,
rocks and sand. Bipedal scincoids

offered us their crop
of thorn apples, alerted
by the hunger in our eyes.

We ate the bitter fruits
with strange abandon,
alkaloids flooding arroyos

in our brains, and many voices
echoed through the rilles.
The words of poets

warred with warriors’ cries,
the din of diatribes,
one signal ringing true

through all the noise
of presidential speeches,
the perorations

of a strutting class
of dustmongers among
dustmongers, and I awoke

to a coyote’s lonely cry.

Anamnesis originally appeared in Xenophilia #8 (Joy Oestreicher, editor).

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