Anna McPherson

And the door opened
and then there she was:
my first love

Not the first girl I was in love with,

Nor the first girl who we were in love with together.

No, that childish first love, the pure kind, 
Where there's a creature of perfection in your life
When you are very, very small
Before you grow and parts make everything complicated,
Back when it was only: see & adore

Then, an angelic little blonde girl.

Now, a winsome, lissom woman.

Then, a mystery who spoke some magic language 
To her mother and sister that tormented me 
For my ignorance; I could not understand.

Now, behind the blue eyes and sandy, darkened hair,
Told over a leisurely, lovely dinner with friends,
Are stories and a life I cannot, could never, truly comprehend,
They of the travails and joys of a Swedish yoga instructor
Who's going back to school to become a physical therapist
And who recently got engaged on an Austrian peak
And lives with her fiancé and perhaps his adolescent daughter
Way up in a part of the world where it alternates light and darkness.

But in all of that "now" are echoes,
Of that bare-remembered past,
Before she moved away,
And English, her Father tongue,
Gave way to Nordic dominance,
Before the world and I attacked each other vehemently.

And I'm engulfed by the vague and strange,
And melancholy, but pleasant, feeling of remembering
The power of the time she kissed me innocently
While we were chucked in a back bedroom
Watching a VHS tape of "Romancing the Stone"
And I ran to the front of the house,
To where the adults were having their dinner party,
To yell with joy and disbelief
"Anna kissed me on the cheek!"
And was shushed back to finish the movie,
the grin plastered wide across my face.

When the world was raw and new and full of hope and wonder.