The Failure
Robert Allen
October 23, 2021
Dennis Wheeler was my friend in third grade.
I’d walk from my house to the trailer park
where he lived. Adorning his bedroom walls
on narrow shelves sat the cool model airplanes
he had built and painted. They looked amazing.
“Hide the plastic,” he’d say, “or pretense falls.”
Besides fighters, bombers, and modern jets
was one special plane, bigger than the rest:
a balsa-wood biplane, flames on the cowl,
long yellow wings, motorized, hand-controlled.
Given space, it could loop or spin or roll.
“In the wrist,” he’d smile, with the engine loud.
I treated him miserably back then.
We could be walking at school during recess
when suddenly, for no reason, I’d hike
my leg and kick him in the guts, as if
I had the right. What an asshole I was.
He’d laugh it off. “Price of friendship,” he’d joke.
I think we played together every day.
It was a thrill to know I had a friend,
someone as constant as the ocean tide.
When Dennis had to move to California,
he did his best to find me a replacement:
another wingman along for the ride.
His last day, while he stood in front of class,
when each of us got up to say goodbye,
you’d think I might have known how dire, how bleak
the situation was, what words to say,
how much I’d miss the guy, his model planes,
his earnest ways. Instead, I could not speak.
I neither saw nor heard from him again.
I bet he works in the theater biz now,
designing sets. His girlfriend, jet black curls,
temps for Merrill Lynch when she’s not employed
as a prop girl. They own a gorgeous house
and a dog, and weekends, they watch for whales.
What could I say to him now we are grown?
That his patience, grit, and love of detail
inspire my days? That when my kind of art
should fail to fly or roar or color true,
I remember my friend Dennis, and still
can find no words to fuel this empty heart?
Robert Allen is retired and lives in San Antonio with his wife, two children, five antique clocks, and five cats. He has poems in Voices de la Luna, the Texas Poetry Calendar, Writers Take a Walk, and Poetry on the Move. He co-facilitates Gemini Ink's Open Writer's Lab.
