Memory Bank
by David Edwards
The river has dried up and nothing comes.
The once soft bed cracks wise and dry,
and says Remember? This has never run.
Wishing it could recall satiation, my mind will lie
fallow and forget if the banks ever lay fertile.
Not even memory grows under the wrung-out sky.
But the bed’s guileless cracks reveal some drier still
stone mimesis of forgotten life and bone.
Lying cast in epochs of mud cracks a fossil.
The petrified relic sharpens my thoughts like a wet stone
until they point past the dry sky’s horizon.
The reliquary croaks of something before and after this old rhône.