The scientists brought them back,  
their damp early motion resembling 
the recoil of an infant fist. My hand 
sputtered, exsanguinated fire 
from nest. That night,  

we argued over responsibility:  
the science that revives organisms back 
into worlds no longer awaiting  
them. Can you imagine a woolly mammoth  
foraging a field of wind turbines?  
In rising heat? 

Even this image can be misleading — 
many candidates for de-extinction are selectively 
bred into traits, coaxed from centuries in  
dormancy as seed or blood, edited   
into rebirth. They do not think of  
their resurrection in terms of long sleep.  
Some could not even be called related, closer to  

regurgitation. Out in the yard,  
the wind went through the pyre. It said 

                                      What returns  
                will never be the same  

You went outside and felt the water 
underneath the ground.  
I was stunned by the juncture of your restless form,  
swallowing light rather than splitting it evenly.  
Outside, the world was still incalculable  
in that what sustained us also killed us — the sun  
in the air and the particles for consumption  
and the nation. Near the border, in korea,  

all I saw was a plain. I thought,  
this cannot be all there is,

The same thought when my relative trimmed  
her husband’s grave, then watered back the grass. The soil  
gulped tears of blood.  

…  

On the fifth day after you went,  
I climbed against the downward trickle  
of your stream, searching for a vein.  
The dowsing rod called your names — 

               Aquifer. Delight. Budding. Grievance.  

                                      Loved One. You ran clear, deep.  
                                      Next to you, beside you, 
I finally tumbled down the mountain, whittling  
wind in my mouth. Gathering of time in speed.  
You grew rapidly from sapling to hill  
to grave in a moment’s guileless efficiency.  

The narrowing of space between  
approaching end planes.  

Extinction or singular death, you believed  
in the multitude of next time, in which  
the velocity of pain orbited in closed 
loop — a revolutionary ribbon — both strangling  
and sustaining the monument until collision, until

blood fell into my arms.