Sophomore year in high school she took off
with a biker in a hippie caravan headed
for California and came back in her late twenties
to care for her grandma at the family farm
On afternoons later in life, a recluse
rocking in the shade of flourishing trees
at the same house in southern Missouri,
she nodded often, smiled some, said little
I knew her best at eleven, a gangly monkey
with tiny sculptured breasts poking
from under a boy’s white t-shirt
never saying no to nothing or nobody
We met in the windbreaks near the fairgrounds
when our folks were in town shopping,
happy to be free of their craziness
and the humdrum of their gray lives
Her mouth forever flower tasting,
she kissed me often, pinched a lot,
raced me barefoot downhill,
fire-faced, hair a raging blond storm
I chased her, lost her,
one morning, one summer,
a wood nymph dashing far ahead
through the whirling day