A Finger

After most of the bodies were hauled away

and while the FBI and the Fire Department and NYPD

were still haggling about who was in charge, as smoke cleared,

the figures in Tyvek suits came, gloved, gowned, masked,

ghostly figures searching rubble for pieces of people,

bagging, then sending the separate and commingled remains

to the temporary morgue set up on site.

This is where the snip of forefinger began its journey.

Not alone, of course, but with thousands of other bits not lost

or barged off with the tonnage for sorting at the city landfill.

A delicate tip, burnt and marked "finger, distal" and sent over

to 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.

Source: Empires (Copper Canyon Press, 2019)