Just One Poem: “When You Find My Body”
“When You Find My Body” is a poem I wrote and published that relates details from the story of Geraldine Largay, a sixty-six-year-old hiker who went missing from the Appalachian Trail in 2013.
Local law enforcement, the FBI and hundreds of volunteers, including professional rescuers and park wardens searched by foot, horseback, and air. Her body was found in 2015 two miles from the trail next to a notebook that contained a month’s worth of final entries. The title of the poem comes from her final entry, which reads, “When you find my body, please call my husband George and my daughter Kerry.”
Kakalak Journal published “When You Find My Body” in their 2023 journal. Kakalak is published in North Carolina and features poetry and art in the spirit of the Carolinas. I decided to submit this poem to this journal because my cohort buddy, Kathleen Calby, has had a good experience working with this publication and because this poem takes place on the Appalachian trail which cuts through 96 miles of the state and runs along 220 miles of the border. Along with Kathleen Calby, several other cohort sisters are published in this issue—Anne Cowie and Adriana Estill.
I have revised this poem somewhat since this version was published, and I think you will enjoy the changes when you see it in my book. This version is pretty good too, though. See below for the full text.
When You Find My Body
I need more words to say, this is not the lifeI expected. Just when I sink my cheekinto what I think is dirt-groundlevel, there is another layer to go.Lower, lower is the way, the ancients say,
but how I miss light and the way wind laughs
in leaves. I cannot rid myself of loving
white cake with rich frosting. My body
yearns to be covered in thick lotion,
rubbed in by warm, familiar hands,
and I will always own more books
than I can read. What I think I mean
is, I cannot make myself lighter. Gerry
gets this. Gerry, not far from an age
I will soon be, hiked the Appalachian trail,
neared the end where a husband of decades
waited, took a pee in the woods and was lost.
She wandered the forest for days
while search planes flew above the soft
pines that dropped needles on her face,
her hands, and, finally, her bones. When
they found her notebook years later,
it was next to her sleeping bag, under
her crumpled orange tent, and the rest
of her and all she carried was gone. She left
everything in the notes she wrote
to her husband and daughter. The letters
were not finished, but they said it all.