Two Poems

[A Letter Written to You While I Am Away]

each year the river sinks lower and I have been
nowhere new
save for clinics and their board game
rooms that rattle
in my head like dice
flashes of only men with overgrown
beards they have forgotten
their beards like dead farmer’s crops
but I remember them clearly
those men and their beards
they stomp between my ears every time
the doctor asks me
to shed the clothes beneath my waist

When It Was Too Cold to Sleep in a Tent

we had not seen such a black
our headlamps like the wrong knife through bread
the cold was a reverse swelling
in my knees and wrists
but you, drunk, kept insisting
that we had gone to the tropics

you put paper umbrellas
into our river water cocoa and told me you heard
waves instead of trees
and I counted five four three
hours until sunrise
when we could become thawed versions of ourselves
and pioneer back home

but how terrible that sun was
when she stabbed at our tent
before we could become sober
before you and I crawled out burned
and looking for some way to cross the hills