The Body as an Artifact

My bruises compress the tissue beneath,
like the ancient footprints of terrible lizards
in now-dry riverbeds. As the body erodes,

my weathered hardness, my earned density,
will slowly surface in relief—the shapes
of hands and door jambs

table legs and bike pedals
car crashes and river rocks.
Pressed against emergent bone, read

like Braille, a history of textures,
briefly brushing contact
that shouldn’t have left marks. My bruises

condense one over the other;
like tree rings, like tooth enamel,
like the rainbow inside a jawbreaker.

When my shell is excavated, when
my core samples are harvested, when
my cross-sections are documented,

science will remember my real age
and deeply stratified pain, the tangles
to dig out of sleep. The tangible

drag, like swimming fully clothed
with the suck of silt to the knees. My bruises
blossom from the marrow of my bones

after latent years in dormant seed.
The kissing wind waking
the bloom of blood inside the aril

and rising to the sunlight
in the deepest purple I’ve ever seen;
a subcutaneous bleed I don’t remember earning.