Late Treatise on Bovine Gestation

For as with the variety of garden roses,
as with the panoply of copyrighted names

and patterning and damask lacework
we have chosen to massage into petal

edges, grafting, snipping, and splicing
genes like reels of silver nitrate film,

our livestock’s clocks are manipulated.
Artificially inseminated, some heifers calve

in winter, now, so the calves’ tufted tails,
sopping wet with afterbirth, freeze solid

to pastures’ frozen grasses. Production’s
byproduct, anachronism, this raw spiral

is a cut above. So I ask: Who among you
rides herd? Who will sever the first tail

and in so doing free the child, tethered by
life and by limb and by time-all-wrong

to this cold dirt? Roses we call Knockout,
East of Eden, and Wild Blue Yonder, now,

and we know how the movie that begins
with the long, slow pan of a projector room

filled with film canisters tends to end,
in dissolution, or if not dissolution, fire.