The line in the Genesis song says: "Seems Helen of Troy has found a new face, again".

Who is Elona? A dim memory. She was in my ninth grade civics class, and for half the year in my tenth grade English class. Her hair was perfect: It was a page-boy cut, but thick and bushy at the bottom. It came down below her ears, but not too low. She had startling blue eyes. I find it odd now that I can tell little more of my memories of Elona other than she had blue eyes; I was in a class with her exactly fifty-five minutes a day for one and a half years between the time I came and she went. One day, through chance, she sat in the seat directly in front of me in English class. We did not have assigned seats, and I usually got there fairly early, and the class just filled in the seats in such a way that she was there. I remember she wore a western-style denim jacket with a fringe of leather tassels across the back and down the sleeves. Elona did not know I existed; I have no recollection of her ever speaking directly to me for any reason. I knew Elona was going to move away from Asheville, during the Christmas break, because I overheard her telling someone in English class. She was going to California. She was, as Jack Kerouac said, "a western kinsman of the sun". So I memorized the last image of her as much as I could. On the last day I saw her, she wore what must have been an appropriate outfit for someone in the process of moving: an old, red flannel shirt and jeans. One last look that had to last me a lifetime. Here, on this day in the uncarpeted English classroom, the bare wooden boards of the room and the plaster walls framing a scene no one but me would remember, I knew I would never see Elona again.

But I remembered. This led to a series of four poems, written over a number of years, that explore the effect of an influence like this on me.

Elona: MYTHOLOGY. This poem is sentimental, reflecting on a mythologized ideal of the real person.

Elona (Part Two): REALITY. Honesty creeps in, as the poet deals with himself and his mythology in the cold light of reality.

The Exorcism (Ghosts Banished Forever): MEMORY. The truth is, there is no "Elona", in a sense, only a frozen memory which must be released. This poem was heavily influenced by the (unfinished) story "After Ten Years" by C.S. Lewis, where Helen of Troy is seen after the ten-year war as a real person, not a myth. Had he only been able to complete it, "After Ten Years" would have been Lewis' masterpiece; as it is, the unfinished story is powerful in how it suggests more than it could ever tell.

Koren (Twenty Years Later): MOVING ON. This poem shows how, in revisiting those years, the mythology has been left behind and the memory has faded. Many years after writing the other poems, I found a high-school reunion site and typed the name in just to see what would happen, and there was no results, but an advertisement for a public records search company turned up results. An Elona, whose middle name is Koren, is alive and well, living in a Los Angeles suburb. I have a vague memory that her middle initial was K, although I never knew what it stood for, so I suppose this is the same person.

The story about reading Keats "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" is true, as related in "Elona (Part Two)". In the English class that spring (of 1988), each student had to pick a poem from our textbook and read it aloud (but thankfully not memorize it) before the class. I would like to say I picked "Merci" for its literary qualities (or its inspiration of Genesis lyrics, a connection I had not yet made), but by the time I got to choose a poem there was little choice left by the time I got to choose. If Elona had not moved away (for she was long gone by then), she would have been in the English class, and, considering the subject matter ("her wild wild eyes" etc.), the experience would have been interesting to say the least.

Elona looked remarkably like the dancer with the page-boy haircut in Sting's music video for "We'll Be Together".