Empires. John Balaban

the Medical Examiner’s, where forensic anthropologists

      sorted human from animal bones from Trade Center restaurants,

      all buried together in the Pompeian effect of incinerated dust.

      The bit of finger (that might have once tapped text messages,

      potted a geranium, held a glass, stroked a cat, tugged

      a kite string along a beach) went to the Bio Lab

      where it was profiled, bar-coded, and shelved in a Falcon tube.

      Memorial Park—that is to say: the parking lot behind the ME—

      droned with generators for the dozens of refrigerated trucks

      filling with human debris, while over on the Hudson at Pier 94

      families brought toothbrushes or lined up for DNA swabbing.

      As the year passed, the unidentified remains were dried out

      in a desiccation room—humidity pumped out, heat raised high—

      shriveled, then vacuum sealed.

      But the finger tip had

      a DNA match in a swab from her brother. She was English.

      30 years old. She worked on the 105th floor of the North Tower.

      The Times ran a bio. Friends posted blogs. Her father

      will not speak about it. Her mother planted a garden in Manhattan.

      In that garden is a tree. Some look on it and feel restored.

      Others, when the wind lifts its leaves, want to scream.

      AFTER THE INAUGURATION, 2013

      Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins.

      Epistle to the Hebrews, 9:22

      Pulling from the tunnel at Union Station, our train

      shunts past DC offices and then crosses the rail bridge

      over the tidal Potomac blooming in sweeps of sunlight.

      Except for me and two young guys in suits studying

      spreadsheets on their laptops, and the tattooed girl

      curled asleep across two seats, and the coiffed blonde lady

      confined to her wheelchair up front next to piled luggage,

      it’s mostly black folk, some trickling home in high spirits,

      bits of Inaugural bunting and patriotic ribbons

      swaying from their suitcase handles on the overhead racks,

      all of us riding the Carolinian south.

      Farther on, where it’s suddenly sailboats and gulls

      on a nook of the Chesapeake, the banked-up railbed

      cuts through miles of swamped pines and cypress

      as the train trundles past the odd heron stalking frogs,

      or, picking up speed, clatters through open cornfields

      where, for a few seconds, staring through the dirty glass,

      you can spot turkeys scrabbling the stubble. Farther south,

      past Richmond, something like snow or frost glints off a field

      and you realize it’s just been gleaned of cotton

      and this is indeed the South. As if to confirm this fact

      to all of us on Amtrak, some latter-day Confederate

      has raised the rebel battle-flag in a field of winter wheat.

      At dusk, just outside Raleigh, the train slows

      and whistles three sharp calls at a crossing in Kittrell, NC.

      Along the railroad tracks, under dark cedars, lie graves

      of Confederates from Petersburg’s nine-month siege, men

      who survived neither battle nor makeshift hospital

      at the Kittrell Springs Hotel, long gone from the town

      where our train now pauses for something up ahead.

      Nearby in Oxford, in 1970, a black GI was shot to death.

      One of his killers testified: “That nigger committed suicide,

      coming in here wanting to four-letter-word my daughter-in-law.”

      Black vets, just back from Vietnam, set the town on fire.

      Off in the night, you could see the flames from these rails

      that once freighted cotton, slaves, and armies.

      Now our Amtrak

      speeds by, passengers chatting, or snoozing, or just looking out

      as we flick on past the shut-down mills, shotgun shacks, collapsed

      tobacco barns, and the evening fields with their white chapels

      where “The Blood Done Sign My Name” is still sung, where

      the past hovers like smoke or a train whistle’s call.

      CHRISTMAS EYE AT WASHINGTON’S CROSSING

       Omnia reliquit servare rempublicam

      Society of the Cincinnati

      Out on the freezing Delaware, ice sheets bob the surface, breaking

      against granite pilings of the colonial river inn swept by winter storm.

      Gusts of snow blow off a sandbar and sink in plunging currents

      where a line of ducks paddles hard against the blizzard

      as cornfields on the Jersey banks are whisked into bits

      of stalks and broken sheaves spinning in the squalls.

      This is where, one such Christmas night, the tall courtly general with bad teeth

      risked his neck and his rebels to cross the storming river and rout the Hessians.

      *

      What made them think they could succeed? … farmers mostly,

      leaving homesteads to load cannon into Durham boats

      to row into the snowstorm, then march all night to Trenton,

      saving the Republic for Valley Forge and victory at Yorktown.

      Before crossing, legend says, they assembled in the snow to hear

      Paine’s new essay about summer soldiers and sunshine patriots.

      What words could call us all together now? On what riverbank?

      For what common good would we abandon all?

      CIBOLERO

       During this time Castillo saw, on the neck of an Indian, a little buckle

       from a sword belt, and in it was sewed a horseshoe nail. He took it from

      the Indian, and we asked what it was; they said it had come from Heaven.

      We further asked who had brought it, and they answered that some men,

       with beards like ours, had come from Heaven to that river; that they had

      horses, lances and swords, and had lanced two of them.

      The Journey of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca (1542)

      It’s 7:00