The Archaeologist
by Theodora Goss

Someday, a thousand years from now,
an archaeologist will find your skull
and say, he must have been a handsome man,
this denizen of the primitive
twenty-first century,
before humanity had sailed across
the black sea of space. She will search around
your resting place for shards of pottery,
sift the soil for evidence of ash,
fragments of bone. She will examine
every stone to learn what kind of litter
society left in its midden, evaluate
all that is broken.

She will recreate
your features based on bone structure,
fragments of DNA, educated
conjecture, and an adolescent crush
on the contours of your cheeks, the elegant
curve of your brow, your jaw.
She will mistake the color of your eyes,
which are only blue in certain moods,
on sunny days.
But in so many ways she will capture
you, as I see you today,
with the kind of beauty that inheres
in the skeleton
and will endure when you and I,
my love, are gone, long gone.

(The images is The Excavation of Pompei by Filippo Palizzi.)