Tools for an Excavation
By Shome Dasgupta
Poached sun—its streams streaked a gloss upon the window, and the window, its sill and pane, looked over darkened soil and mud, and beyond the soil, near a cracked wheelbarrow, he stood in bare feet—stripped to his skin while petals of perspiration flittered down his stomach. A stomach of shadowed muscles, he came to his knees in a heave—such heavy breath as the world in his head burdened all he could bear. Under broken barrow, a site to grave, a gradient increasing in a mind full of fertilizer and manure—a shovel. So, a shovel. A stab into earth—the kick of the dirt, a splash this way and that, he churned the land under the cart, its deflated tires sunken in like the roots of an oak. A foot for every year—deep and deep and deeper until there appeared a rib and a rib and a hind, bone upon bone like when he went to the museum to ponder fossils before time. He leaned in and pressed his cheek against the striped chest, huffing calcium and minerals of any remains. A silence of breath—the pine for a pine, let the day go amid the dizzying center. He opened his hands and moved his head over to the mandible and listened—a whimper he heard from his own tongue, a pup’s song. A pant and a sigh, he brushed his cheek against skeleton, feeling its holes and chasms, deep into a darkness—perhaps a beat or sigh, he wished a sound. A gentle pat on the skull, like way back when, on the porch with a glass of lemonade and a stained glass morning, and he filled the gaps with seeds and mulch, much to be raked and tracked, the bones disappeared again into clay and turf and down down down and away his love went. The spirit and the ghost, entwined and wrapped, to exit the eyes full of sorrow and sleep. Sprinkled dew or tears upon the mound, a smoothened shape to dream upon in weighted slumber, he leaned his back against the barrow and lumber and waited—eyes closed and opened pores, the dusk and dust arrived among maddened mosquitoes, and misty mazes irrigated and eroded from unleashed banter of memories and miracles. Dragonflies and fiery cries pleated and stitched on a brow stricken with bouldering echoes, anxious to heel—heal. To give one’s own life to bring back another, he mulled, only to be separated again he wished a way or another to break the sciences to live side by side, six legs in total, no longer six feet under. His back against chipped rust and wood, he let it settle onto his neck for anthropomorphic tendencies and tightened fists molded and massed, a caked heel tucked its way into the plain. He knew this was not a garden for flowers and fruit, but with nurture and nature and a rain of stars, that a pup might grow back to life with a bark and lifted paw.
Shome Dasgupta is the author of The Seagull And The Urn (HarperCollins India), and most recently, Atchafalaya Darling (Belle Point Press), The Muu-Antiques (Malarkey Books), Tentacles Numbing (Thirty West), and Iron Oxide (Assure Press). He lives in Lafayette, LA and can be found at www.shomedome.com and @laughingyeti.