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It waits now for snows to fall

upward, into a summer

whose green leaves

vanish,

but back into branch, into sap, into rain.

It waits for the old

to grow young, fed and unfearful,

for freighters to carry their hold-held oil

back into unfractured ground,

for fires to return

their shoeboxes of photos and risen homes.

It unbuilds the power line’s towers

before the switch can be toggled,

puts the child, rock still in hand, back into his bed.

A single gesture of erasure

pours back into trucks and then river

the concrete wall,

unrivets the derrick,

replenishes whale stocks and corals.

And why not—it is easy—restore the lost nurse herds

of mammoths to grazing,

the hatched pterodactyl to flight?

Let each drowned and mud-silted ammonite once again swim?

One by one unspoken, greed’s syllables, grievance’s insult.

One by one unsewn, each insignia’s dividing stitch.

One by one unimagined,

unmanufactured: the bullet, the knife, the colors, the concept.

Reversal commands: undo this directional grammar of subject and object.

Reversal commands: unlearn the alphabet of bludgeon and blindness.

Reversal commands: revise, rephrase, reconsider.

And the ink, malleable, obedient, does what is asked.