Seth Wieck

Stratford-upon-Nothing

 Highway 54, SW of Stratford, Texas, pop. 1886

Seventy miles at seventy miles-an-hour

lullabied by sunlight, tiresong, and wind.
There’s not stitch nor sign of civilization
except the highway and highline wires;

or save the waves of native short grass plains

carved into squares by five-line barbed-wire

four fathers ago then quietly maintained.

Those slide by at eye-level, parallel

lines laid on lines, as though a book were tipped

on end and the reader tasked to discern

the meaning of some dozen or sixteen lines

by the inked letters’ mere elevations.

Where the highway comes at you and at your

eye, and your eye finds no distance in the land

on which to land as all lines converge and blur,

there is a farmer who was only patroned

by tenuous contact with humanity,

holed up in his shop, woodstove roaring

with the winter wind in his chimney.

Taken with a vision of fortifying

the broke down frame of a windmill

rebuilt as a forty-foot windvane.

A half-ton, balanced, galvanized tin cobble

like the flipped fuselage of a paper airplane

shorn of its wings, he mounted on a pivot,

so when spring winds come screaming where there is no lee

the invisible hand of God can give it

a spin. Show you where to look and what to see.

Seth Wieck's stories, poetry, and essays can be read at Narrative Magazine, the Broad River Review, and Front Porch Republic, where he is a contributing editor. His debut collection of poetry is forthcoming from Wiseblood Books in 2026.