As if lightning had hammered twice, the bolts,

separated by many years in a deja-vu stroke of fleeting memory,

flashed out of the eerie stillness of the predawn desert hush.

Deep within that chill of darkest solitude, disturbing awareness

grew of something rushing towards perception at blinding speed.

Just beyond the limit of raw senses, it screamed silently

across the hushed sands at less than ten meters.

My intent search of the cold shimmer of azure sky

tracked the merest reflective glints of sun on distant silver,

caught and painted like a radar ghost in thermal waves of rising sun.

Within a single heartbeat the object grew explosively

until it filled my entire gaze, a fierce and beautiful machine

with wings of quicksilver came headlong, a wicked needle

forged in some demonic, cataclysmic fire, taking vectors

as if targeted with obdurate kinetic force toward

the unprotected human heart and mind.

Faster than thought, quicker than regret, with hellish haste

I became caught up in vibrating sympathy with ancient urgent forces

as the silver-winged machine screamed wildly over my head,

engine howling and afterburner bellowing like a demon song

gone mad with raging pain, passing so near I felt I could

have reached up and touched it, strangely drained of all

fears of death and daring to watch, ears ringing, as the

aircraft lifted suddenly skyward, going beyond the speed

of sound, soaring impossibly high into the vast

and limitless ocean of heavy desert air.

 Once again alone, left gaping, staggered by the sudden shock

of pure vacuum in its passing, there was very little left to affirm

what reality had just existed: the cool of the early desert morning, the

shifting sands of experience, memory, and emotion, the emptiness

of insubstantial fragments of time and space gone forever.

Nothing more than this…and a single distant flash of sun on liquid

silver wings, flaring briefly in the endless depths of cobalt blue infinity

to remind me of what had come and gone…again and forever .