Bring out the dead–the passenger
pigeon and Carolina parakeet,
the Tasmanian tiger, the dodo,
the mammoth still sleeping
in icy Neolithic dreams.
Unspool them in ribbons and splice
the shredded places with golden
genomic scrap, and if we are lucky
they’ll rise again, more substantial
than alchemy, more solid than ghosts.
Maybe a crooked wing, a halt
in the step, one blue eye where once
both were brown, but all the pieces,
new and old, must fit–no gaps, no holes,
no places we could slip through
like smoke and disappear inside
their baffled resurrected memory.
For who said the dead regret us, our messy
lusts, the bloody coup d’etat,
or even the unweeded garden,
the dog unfed on the porch?
We wander through bedrooms slamming
empty drawers, through kitchens
to bang the utensils,
all the while wailing, Tell us,
tell us you love us!
We want what we want.
We search for it in anything we find:
a sock, a poem, a bone, a tooth,
a strand of DNA like spider’s gossamer
twisted at the bottom
of a glass pipette.