When they roused me
from my thirty-year slumber,
my first memory was of that time
when I told you you made the best pie.
Who’d have thought I’d find a man
who cooks better than I ever could?
I wish that I'll never run out, I said,
and you lectured me once more:
the fleetingness of things
is the only faculty with which we enjoy.

Yet, when you said goodbye
as the avian disease took hold,
I never could let you go.
Call me mad if you wish,
but when I allowed us to be frozen,
I had nothing but your welfare in mind.
I knew they’d find a cure for death,
and though you might cry sacrilege,
such a thing exists in nature:
the hydra cheats, as do bacteria. Why
must crumbling doctrines stop us?

The cryogenicists are here now.
I am alive; soon, you will be, too,
and we will both be so for long.
They say you will be different,
having gone through death
before preservation; they say
you won’t know who I am.
Would you like to tell him? they ask,
but I was just leaving.
You have forever
to forgive me.