Unearthed

For too many years, all through the late 2000s, I was obsessed with a website and organization called EDAN, which stood for Everyone Deserves a Name. It is probably still out there but I had to stop looking at it. EDAN's site had 2 kinds of lists. One was a state-by-state list of missing persons, usually with photographs -- sometimes those awful, speculative, age-enhanced photographs -- and details of their lives, along with the "circumstances of disappearance." It was eerie, and also endlessly mysterious to me to see how many people there were who seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth, suddenly, never to be seen again. If the person had been missing a long time, then in the picture they might have a period haircut or jacket or dress -- from the 60s, 70s or 80s -- and it was as if they were frozen in time.

The other list was of unidentified bodies found across the country, with the little that was known of the deceased, and how he or she was killed. Sometimes the state of the remains did not allow for much description. This list also had computer approximations of what someone might have looked like based on their skeletal remains. These reconstructions all looked alike to me, humanoid as opposed to human, and I don't see how they could have been helpful. Sometimes there was only a piece of clothing to describe. A blue fleece jacket or striped socks. Sometimes the personal descriptions were very precise because the person had just died. Often these were homeless people, or migrant workers from Central America who had been hit by cars while trying to cross a busy highway near San Diego, or who had died in the Arizona desert. Sometimes they would post a photograph of a tattoo, just a segment of an arm or leg, and I would think about the day they got that tattoo, the impetus, the design decision, what they paid, who they couldn't wait to show it to, if the killer noticed it.

"...found in a field by a farmer plowing."

I remember it seemed to me that many of the bodies had been found by plowing farmers, in late winter or very early spring. They had been unearthed, and I always thought that "unearthed" could be a word meaning, to die, to leave this world, this Earth. But sometimes I thought the living were really the ones who were unearthed, for a time, while we're alive, because we had made ourselves separate from the earth, from our origins, like we were too good for the mud and muck we came from. 

There are people who are convinced that there was a serial killer at work in Galveston, Texas, in the mid-80s. In something I read about it, a police officer said that, whoever the killer was, he was "raising one boatload of hell." I remember thinking how evocative, even precise, that phrase was. I could picture rising out of the earth, out of some dry farm field, a giant boat loaded with evil death. I remember thinking how this killer really was bringing into this world a kind of hell for his victims and their families. It seemed to me that a lot of women in that part of Texas were being found in fields by farmers and that they had come to a sad unearthing. I wrote this brief poem, which you should try to read as if I hadn't told you all this.

Unearthed

Always the unidentified remains.

What was once us

is again the alien other

whose circumstances of reappearance

are her circumstances of disappearance,

by the laws of earth and heaven 

terrestrial, mineral, like all the women

killed in Galveston Texas

in 1986

by someone raising

one boatload of hell:

found in a field by a farmer plowing.