is missing. He's been missing for twenty one years.
Year one there was only silence. Oh, there were letters.
Letters waiting in the poste restante. Letters at hotels
where he never arrived.

In the second year, his sister traveled south
as far as Quito, where there was nothing, nothing ringing
like a phone at the end of an empty hall, and wrote home
that it was a lurid and unbridled place,

a singular impulse toward some kind of animal heaven,
where jungles clog doorways, dense as midden,
and cities are piled high with remnants of colonial defeat.
I arrived in year three

when the boy resembled an archangel in a Catholic mission,
from which no saintly names escape. Idle padres swayed
this way and that, confused by the absence of confession.
But this is not his fate. His sister left him

laved in tropic heat, his face papered, curling off
the wall of an Ecuadorian restaurant. In that moment
of suspension, in the eye of the storm that has left you standing
near to its center but aware of the fury that surrounds you,

you experience your own unknown disappearance.
In the streets outside you hear an ancient curse,
time gnashes its teeth, you collapse like a fisted hand.
It's not death, but not knowing. Not death

but not having it known.
In the photograph he stands on a lawn in Minnesota
in bright backpack, not sweet but there is
a gentleness to his features, a pre-jungle grace of garden,

awkward, but ready for some untold adventure,
for something out there beyond the camera, something
certain but untouchable, something
obscenely real.