The Skull and the Girl

Her thin white legs are sweet. She crouches down, takes a small brush, sweeps dirt off my partly exposed skull. I am extinct, the way some pachyderms are while others are not. Ice fields turn to desert. Wind-straws evolve into sun hats. An archaeologist discovers. I like her hands, they cup and measure, they feel the weight of dispersed things. The flesh over her knees gentles the earth. She spreads herself – an eclipse of her. She tugs my skull from the earth, uncouples my emptiness. An era passes an age. I am a footprint in an Alzheimer’s ward, yet I recall her fingers how once they brought sight to my eye-sockets, how she placed me under the green-vine of her life, cared for my hollowness, planted the scent of her youth in it. Questions like: who-what-where, and how do not arise.