It was those nights, in the second floor bedroom of that stucco house off Bandera, that I began writing my poetry. The first ones were sweet and sincere and hideous as I recall, all about baling hay with Daddy, and baking biscuits with Mommy. Then I composed my war trilogy. Only instead of writing about the war I knew, the one with rations and black windows and the loaded .410 Papa kept by his bed in case of an invasion of the panhandle, I made it all happen in France and Germany. I was the girl who tramped through the snows to the barbwired death camps. I was the maiden who hid with other children in the haystacks outside the Black Forest during combat, I was-oh, it was passionate and worthless stuff. Then I began my love sonnet period, an utterly fatuous exercise until I began to stick in passages about Ramos Herrera.

Ramos was tall and thin and quiet. His hair was longer than any I’d ever seen on a boy. It was black and went all the way to his shoulders. At lunches Ramos sat alone. Not with the fifty or sixty other Mexican boys he could have sat with, not with the blonde Junior Farmers. One day Ramos walked into the classroom with no shirt on under loose overalls and he was told to go home. He didn’t hesitate, just went. I think that was the first poem I wrote about him, “Smooth-skinned Ramos, Walking Home.”

The more I wrote, the harder it was to be in the same room with him, even two desk rows apart. I was much more at home with him in my dream world, and I believed, if he had a choice, he’d have picked my poems over his real life too; he was a matador in some, a portrait painter in others, a brain surgeon on the battlefield, my beloved in all of them. Some mornings when he would walk so straight and tall, almost feline, to his desk, I would practically shake my head in amazement that Ramos Herrera was actually flesh of this world. He was famous to me then. Those last two years of high school we never met or spoke to one another even once. How could I? I had whole notebooks to burn if he opened his mouth and turned out to be dumb. Papa used to say that if he was any dumber his heart would stop. But he became the physical measure by which I judged young men, at least in the just-looking stages.