Valentine’s Day, 2024
Wen we are eighty, we will watch Gunsmoke together
for the first time, you falling in love with Miss Kitty
for the thousandth time, I fooling around with Festus’
poetic language. I will finally ignore your knee-length
white socks, and you will allow me a house fully lighted,
split the air with your handwritten poem, promise crammed and
full of passion, like you did when you were twenty, and then
you will place it in a box numbered 173, purchased
at an antique shop when we were fifty, to allow me to retrieve
that long-expected valentine from the post office number of my childhood.
I could have friends deliver long-stem roses
every half hour throughout the day like I did when we celebrated
your forty, but then again, maybe not—in ten years, it could be
as difficult for us to find friends as it was for Abraham to find
ten righteous men in Sodom. Perhaps we will float down
the crystal-clear Ichetucknee in summer in our battery-heated
black vests after we have struggled down the embankment
and onto the float, laughing maniacally like we did when
we discovered the icy springs at thirty. We will play footsies
with the fish, holding fast to each other as if our lives depend upon it.
Published: Susurrus, 2024