Palaeontology by Stuti Pachisia
for Zoo Tycoon 2
Deep in the night, we discover we loved digging.
I imagine you, in the fractured sun,
digging with green mittens on
in frozen February.
This is from before, when hurt
had not yet pooled and collected
as gritted soil at the edges of our hands.
This is from when there was no need
to gather and speculate over land:
where every bit of frosted earth
contained possibility of alternate life;
from when our loneliness was so
pale and so profound, that we dug and dug
in the hope of tunnelling to the other side
of the world
—or if we were lucky—
finding other palaeontologists
deep in the throes of the earth,
breaking even at this sign of life.
Our faces morph. We are digging,
repeating the names of the
dinosaurs we knew, confusing them
with Pokémon we knew.
We befriend everything we find,
earthworm, old plastic bag, oddly shaped leaf,
sharing in this ancient obsession that
has lived, and will keep on living:
years later, we are digging still.
None of us seeks dinosaurs now. You,
after you found that they were, indeed,
dead; me, after I realized that digging had
led nowhere.
The night grows older. We are
probing, dusting old memories, raising
old bones of contention, when you say
how odd it is, to have lived lives before
each other, orbits without touch; a life
which cannot be unearthed, fossilized in memory.
This is why we dig. I ask what
the greatest gift you have ever received is.
You name my childhood dream,
I imagine you, as I imagine me:
standing over thawing soil
gathering shards of the river
to hold them
up against the sun
You are always wearing a hat,
and the sun prisms into violet and gold
every time it lands on you.
We laugh. And then cry; palaeontologists
having finally discovered life.
