My Wife Doesn’t Like These Sonnets

My Wife Doesn’t Like These Sonnets

Seth Wieck

An ancient cottonwood has never sprung
from the feathered kernels clotted in the leaves.
Any spun cottonseeds, spiraled and flung
on a clef of wind, have never borne trees
that measured longer than seventy years.
Or eighty, by reason of strength and rivers.
Stripped spotted cottons staccato the lower
arroyos beside whole note oak bowers
under whose shade conquistadors siesta’d;
whose branches are five-hundred winters tested.
But you and I, by vigilant husbandry,
might find ourselves intertwined sixty vernal
turns from now, with our sapwood pithed and dry,
our leafclatter in calando, then die.

“Wait, wait,” you say. “You end it when we die?”
“Well, it rhymed,” I reply. “Plus, we will die.”
“You spent all day with your pen in your journal
rhyming die?”                             “I also did a load of laundry.”
“Which I’m folding now!”         “Fine. You’ve addressed it.”
Creasing a bedsheet lengthwise, you press it
between fingertips, shake it, folding lines over
themselves. With your eye-on-the-object look, you hover
on details I’d never see. Perfect squares
stacked in the linen closet. Lines in pairs,
shelves full for our kids. Layered like sediment,
these sheets we’ve shared: the oldest threadbare, the newest spun
from Egyptian cotton, a threadcount testament
of the present perfect moment when our love has begun.

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Seth Wieck
Poet & Writer

Published in Narrative Magazine & Front Porch Republic

Photography by Josh Cunliffe