She eased out of a group celebrating a fiftieth
high school reunion — her wide set and still blue
eyes taking me in an instant back to summer
glazed bodies swimming away whole afternoons
at a bend in the Sandy River in John Yoakim’s
pasture, where current cut a hole deep enough to
swim, where silk black river bottom land grew dark
green corn behind us, and wild plums in the fence
row between, released sweet juice of rose colored
flesh, sliding mouth to breast, feeding the madness
of sixteen in a 1936 Chevrolet after November foot-
ball games, without a heater on a dirt road running
under twin rows of Chinese Elm and Sugar Maple,
one mile with no farm houses… her smiles in Algebra
class making me forget how much I hated Miss Heiser
and algebra. First serious girlfriend, first voice
questing beyond the gentle mediocrity of a prairie
village, virgin dreams like paths to larger rivers — but
as she slid into my arms, she whispered, “Oh Larsen,
you weren’t supposed to get old” — words falling like
blood upon snow, only the tremor in her cadence ma-
king the voice play harlot to memory’s lust, tremor
fighting valley winds for the high ridges, the flute’s
adagio celebrating by her witness to another time,
last salt kingdom of the wild heart’s wings flying blank
blue skies re-collecting scattered dreams of faces
fallen to bone — wound revealing the truest self.
About Larsen Bowker
