490
3
thy
eyes
look
to
me mild. Out of maize
&
air
your body's made, and moves. I summon, see,
from the centuries it.
I
think
you won't stay. How do we
linger, diminished,
in
our lovers'
air,
implausibly visible, to whom, a year,
years, over ilit:ei'inis; or' not;
to a long stranger; or not; shimmer
&
disappear.
4
Jaw-ript, rot with its wisdom, rending then;
then not. When the mouth dies, who misses you?
Your 'master never died,
Simon
ah
thirty years past you-
POckrD.arkt
&
westward staring on a haggard deck
it seems I find you, young. I come to check,
I come to stay with you,
and the Governor,
&
Father,
&
Simon,
&
the huddled meo.
5
By the week we landed we were, most, used up.
Strange ships across us, after a fortnight's winds
unfavouring, frightened us;
bone-sad cold, sleet, scurvy; so were
ill
many as one day we could have no sermons;
broils, quelled; a fatherless child unkennelled; vermin
crowding
&
waiting: waiting.
And the day itself he leapt ashore young Henry Winthrop
6
(delivered from the waves; because he found
off their wigwams, sharp-eyed, a lone canoe
acr~
a tidal river,
that water glittered fair
&
blue
&
narrow, none of the other men could swim
and the"plantation's prime theft up to
him,
shouldered on a glad day
hard on the glorious fea$ting of thanksgiving) drowneq.
