Young Mummy

Young Mummy

In May, the students had gone home,
to leave their daily mourning in small Vermont.
Not a week had passed since young graduates
received their proof of purchase (a diploma and a cane)
and began to mettle in world affairs when the news arrived.

Sirens on a Wednesday afternoon, towards 4 pm,
the height of my professional inactivity, heralded
the discovery of the twenty year old, extracted
from the creek where we were afraid he would be found.

I found out by way of an article online, my friend,
a volunteer firefighter, in the accompanying picture
escorting the stretcher.

For the three interceding months in which he was
missing, speculation, wild fantasy, and a sense of community
took hold:  murmurings of foul play, another strike
of the smiley face killer, someone in Cornwall at
4 in the morning, a helicopter photograph
revealing an ‘object of interest’ in Lake Champlain;
candle-light vigils, cops and agents
with HRD, the technical word for dog in these situations,
his forlorn mother leading students into the woods.

I would later hear someone who knows science
that it was fortunate that spring was so cold
and snowy:  if we’d had a normal spring, the
fish would have just gone nuts; the ice basically
preserved his body as perfectly as it could.

The fortunate coroner ruled out foul play,
but did not necessarily cancel the testimonies
from the young man’s first-year friends
regarding certain liberal use of alcohol and a
likely appearance of weed.

So there are no more dogs sniffing in the snow,
their tracks making perfect lines that chilled us more than the wind,
no more posters in the local stores.
Only a website, reminding us that
he was and will always be twenty years old,
still perfectly preserved thanks to the icy creek,
still unaware that he was the first among his equals to die.