A new road entered the trees
halfway up the hill
next to the pit of bones and horseshoes
some tidy farmer left
three miles from the nearest house.
A hunter lost his coon dog,
I passed it in a ditch.
Rusted barrels scattered the hill,
foundation of a house,
red strips of metal roof, boards and glass---
bones picked clean.
Carried two bones and a horseshoe
back to my house---thought I could
learn what dead objects say.
Horseshoe layers of rust, like shale.
Pitted hoofbone had the appearance
of stone grazed by centuries of air.
The foreleg looked like an old wrench.
Bones were the first hammers.
Maybe those came from horses
who cleared the field on that hill
where hunters shoot grouse now
and blue smoke of chain saws drifts
from the stacked forest.
I put them in the barn behind
a radiator cracked one year
when ice swelled its ribs.
The metal crack rang through the house.
Winter came, we filled the barn
with oak and cherry---limbs of broken trees---
and this month, April
in a cold snap, under the last pile of wood
I found them lying on the floor
mute as worn tools
whose use I couldn't guess.
As a twelve year old around 2003, an older friend of mine gave me several video tapes of the 1966 Marvel Super-Heroes animated series. Iron Man/Tony Stark was voiced by actor John Vernon (Who also voiced Namor the Submariner) and this became the canonical sound of Iron Man for me, I love how the actor's voice was muffled whenever Iron Man appeared in his mask. Is anyone else familiar with the voice of John Vernon as Iron Man? For me, he's more Iron Man than Robert Downey Jr.
On January 9, 2000, a group of hunters were exploring an area about 5 miles east of the small town of Nevada, Missouri. The excursion was going normally until the group found something alarming: a human skull. The hunters reported the finding to the police.
When the area was searched by law enforcement, they found additional evidence: decaying clothing, human hair, coins, parts of a jaw bone belonging to the same person as the skull; but most tellingly, they found a .38 caliber bullet.
The area where the skull and other evidence was discovered was very rural and heavily wooded, though it was about 30 feet from a private driveway. Though the exact area where the body was discovered has not been disclosed, it was said to be an area frequented by deer and other animals, and that the reason that there were so few remains could be that animals had dragged them away.
Investigators were at first unsure of the gender and race of the victim, though they could tell that they were likely a young adult, between their mid teens and mid 30s. It was clear that the skull had signs of wear and likely had been there for some time. Then-Vernon County Sheriff Mickey Mason said that, despite the age, the skull was "in remarkably good condition and shows many dental features." Because of the bullet and suspicious circumstances, the case was considered to likely involve foul play. The victim was dubbed as a John or Jane Doe.
Both the bullet and the other evidence were analyzed in Missouri Highway Patrol labs, and attempts were made to match the clothing found near the victim as well as the teeth of the victim to those of missing people from the area. But despite these efforts, the victim's identity could not be determined. For some time, it was believed that the remains could have belonged to Cheryl Ann Kenney, a 30-year-old woman who had disappeared from Nevada in 1991, but this would prove to be untrue when in 2010, the remains were analyzed by a forensics lab in Louisiana, who managed to narrow down the demographics of the victim more specifically.
The forensics lab determined that the bones belonged to a white male who had been between the ages of 26 to 36 when he died. It is thought that he probably died somewhere between 1985 to 1997, and that his death was, as suspected, the result of a gunshot wound. The new progress in the case encouraged investigators; sheriff Mason had since retired, but new sheriff Ron Peckma
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