By Debbie Lim,
For Bob Slaughter, palaeontologist
He understands the bones of little fish.
The way each spine will set in stone
beneath the weight of forests, sediment,
the collapsed strata of years. How
many times has he lifted those skulls
with a minute brush, blown dust
from the space their fins once radiated?
Asleep, he rolls in chains. Always
this siren-song: thin and unbuckling
as weed, a greening he can’t understand.
Now all he recalls is the seduction
of a whale’s anvil (sweet bouquet of bone),
the possession of a marmoset’s thigh.
And yet it is sufficient: this solitary
marriage, this slow working on a rock’s
bondage. How a dreamed body forms
the skeleton, how myth grafts to stone.
‘The Fossil Maker’ was previously published in Peril.