Atop this red-rocked shelf—Lucidity—
with no jutting branch for a craven change
of mind, the impact promises to be famous—
a one-time splash while zombies line the edge
to gawp. They'd have me tumble back like balsa
on a whitecap. It's expected to be so spurned,
to be ordinary—I don't much care for it:
Nothing happens here that begs description.
But really, I don't like to complain.
Bargain hunters and the merely curious are expected soon to arrive,
and pieces of Elna's past will be carried off, like still-warm of carrion,
in accordance with tenuous necessity—funds for a sun-filled,
dry-air retirement home in Arizona. And let's face it, Michigan
winters are harsh, and for seven springs, the fields have lain unturned.
Too faded to fill the buoyant saffron dress, fanned across her bed,
or to help beloved daffodils prevail against the overrunning weeds,
how could she hope to keep the fusty air from filling vacant rooms?
And everyone knows that it was the indivisible Fred and Freddie
who ran the farm. Fred was the only man to ever make her feel safe,
and Freddie, who was autistic before anyone knew what autism was,
could build an engine and squeeze complex measures from his accordion
with equal skill. In the space of a year, Freddie followed Fred
to an adjacent family plot. It was surely the right of a merciful god
to relieve Elna of sentimentality for possessions and of the obligation
to stay for a son whose only answer was the whisper, I miss my dad.
About a crime how town council had our overpass repainted,
denying the high impact graffito splashed beside the archway
below the rails—testament so sublime that paint-can-wielding
juveniles refused to blaspheme with mere hearts and letters.
A jovial teen—call him Jesus—he had a high-stepping faith
that just happens when Daddy's rich and Mama's good looking.
Remember fiestas, how he'd bop across the grass and twirl
old ladies—You ain't seen nothing yet, pumping from a radio.
And Maria—mahogany hair, emerald eyes and caramel skin,
smooth over newly ripened curves—she had a symmetry
that made that boy rave and compelled a weathered man to
abandon his orchards and gather her in peach-stone hands.
Suppose they're still delicious, tales of a disappearing girl
and the farmer who won't buy his groceries in this town
anymore. When fruits are bruised or fallen, folk around here,
they're pretty quick to press them into cider. Anyway,
losing his Maria sure drove our Jesus hard—better than 60
according to the rubber crescents burned onto the pavement
as he hugged that curve just past the volunteer fire station.
Buckets of paint in the truck's bed, he pushed the pedal down
one last time—Abuela's house a blur to his left—launching
over the curb, slamming shades of blue into the concrete, and
leaving not one hint of exclamation mark on his last stretch
of road, to help us all believe he might've changed his mind.
Allen M. Weber says, "I live in Virginia with my wife and our three sons. Our middle son is autistic, but I've cheered for the underdog long before he was born. The possibility—the likelihood—of failure does not stir in me a sense of hopelessness; so far it has given me something hard to rail against. Still, the inability to live with hopelessness is a terribly real issue. Not an asshole, I'm saddened by societal schadenfreude."
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