Two Pieces

After Ocean Vuong

Write a step by step on
        how you met the love of your life:

we’re driving over the bridge
                through clouds like we’re in the sky &
                                        there’s a Dad shaped hole.
                                        I’m fluent in silence.

My fingers are slurring again
                                counting the stars in the sky.
                They try their best
                                but they can’t do anything.

I don’t want life to harden me.

We spent the day in my bed &
                                we outrun the night
                & just follow the sun.

After Alexa Dimitrov

It’s warming, and all my ice is so thin
that it’s impossible to shield the past
from my inevitable future. Every morning

the sun greets my peaks and every morning
I shed my glaciers with a kind of ancient melancholy
they’ve started calling climate change.
The brave pines, braving altitude on Logan Pass.

The elk grazing near swift currents
and pausing mid-chew.
We’re all fading, even in Montana,

and if this place won’t keep its cool for us,
I guess I’m in decline and in for more thaw.
If you are the hiker at Hidden Lake
somewhere in a city, planning your next escape

and thinking of wearing green,
I would like to be a trail in that escape.
I would like all the paths through my heart

across the decades to slow their melting
and stop tormenting me. Let me preserve snow
on another ridge, in another era
where someone straps on their snowshoes

and steps lightly. And breathes in deeply.
There’s a pause. The elk looking up
lowers its head. The wildflowers bloomed
too early this year. Maybe it’s too late.