"Found"

“Found”

In Memory of Roger Ellison

I would never have seen you had you not gone missing.

How long has it been since someone spoke your name?

Strikingly good-looking, “brother” to The Beatles.

The “Lost Beatle” you might say.

An Eddie Redmayne mouth. A quiet, piercing gaze.

I feel certain you are dead. And yet, here you are,

all these years later, smiling back at me.

Drugs, ecstasy—Colorado has always been youthfully progressive.

It would seem you just fell off the edge of the world in Cedaredge.

Then again, maybe you wandered out into the mountains, having gone

with friends on a camping trip. Maybe you smoked some pot, got laid,

and awoke to relieve yourself.

Maybe in the blue chill of dawn you stood beneath a tree

and felt the cool mist as a hand upon your shoulder.

Your turtleneck—is it a dickie?—suggests artistic proclivity.

Your eyes exacting, a wan smile—

A gift for photography or the guitar.

Standing at seventeen years of age, white snow all around—

you look up at the branched sky as you empty your bladder.

Smile peacefully. Dreamily knowing life won’t ever be so damn good.

It is then, in the simplest moment, crystallized by silence,

that you decide you will never go back.

You leave your friends and the girl you love around the campfire

to wonder for the rest of their lives.

Fresh snowfall erases all evidence of your passing through.

Holding your picture in my hand, you smile as though knowing, even then,

things were going to be different for you.

A brown fox saw you vanish that morning thirty-five years and eight months ago, as did a solemn woodpecker.

They died long ago. And your secret with them.

-Wheston Chancellor Grove