The Use of Poetry

On the day a fourteen-year-old disappeared in Ojai, California,

having left a Christmas Eve slumber party barefoot

to “go with a guy” in a green truck,

and all Christmas Day volunteers searched for her body within a fifteen-mile radius,

and her father and grandfather searched

and spoke to reporters because TV coverage

might help them find her if she were still alive,

and her mother stayed home with the telephone,

not appearing in public, and I could imagine

this family deciding together this division of labor

and what little else they could do to do something,

and the kitchen they sat in, the tones they spoke in,

who cried and who didn’t, and how they comforted one another

with words of hope and strokings of backs and necks,

but I couldn’t imagine their fear that their daughter

had been murdered in the woods, raped no doubt,

tied up, chopped up, God knows what else,

or them picturing her terror as it was happening to her

or their own terror of her absence ever after,

cut off from them before she had a chance to grow through adolescence,

her room ever the same with its stupid posters of rock stars

until they can bear to take them down

because they can’t bear to leave them up anymore—

on this day, which happened to be Christmas,

at the kind of holiday gathering with a whole turkey and spiral-cut ham

and beautiful dishes our hosts spent their money and time making

to cheer their friends and enjoy the pleasure of giving,

in a living room sparkling with scented candles and bunting

and a ten-foot tree adorned with antique ornaments,

the girl’s disappearance kept surfacing in conversations across the room

while I was being cornered by a man who said his wife was leaving him

after twenty-one years of marriage, then recited his resumé

as if this couldn’t happen to someone with his business acumen;

and it did again after I excused myself to refill my punch glass

when someone at the punch bowl said what she had heard about it from someone else

who had played tennis that morning with the girl’s mother’s doubles partner,

while I filled a punch glass for somebody’s dad

brought along so he wouldn’t be alone on Christmas,

a man in his eighties with a face like a raven’s,

his body stooped, ravaged by age and diseases,

who told me he was amazed to still be alive himself

after a year in which he had lost both his wife and son,

then, to my amazement, began telling me how important

he is in his business world

just like the man I had just gotten away from,

that he’s still a player in international steel

involved in top-drawer projects for the navy,

and I was selfish enough to be selfless enough

to draw him out a little, and the younger man, too

(who appeared at my elbow again and started talking again),

but not selfless enough to feel what they each were going through

because my own fear and hunger

cloud how I imagine everyone,

including the bereaved family of the missing girl,

and the girl herself, and certainly her murderer,

although I know what it is to hate yourself completely

and believe all human community is lies and bullshit

and what happens to other people doesn’t matter.

Source: New and Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004)