II. Powhatan’s Daughter: 1. The Harbor Dawn

“—Pocahuntus, a well-featured
but wanton yong girle...of the
age of eleven or twelve years, get
the boyes forth with her into the
market place, and make them
wheele, falling on their hands,
turning their heels upwards, whom
she would followe, and wheele so
herself, naked as she was, all the
fort over.”

400 years and
more... or is
it from the
soundless shore
of sleep that
time

Insistently through sleep — a tide of voices —
They meet you listening midway in your dream,
The long, tired sounds, fog-insulated noises:
Gongs in white surplices, beshrouded wails,
Far strum of fog horns... signals dispersed in veils.

And then a truck will lumber past the wharves
As winch engines begin throbbing on some deck;
Or a drunken stevedore’s howl and thud below
Comes echoing alley-upward through dim snow.

And if they take your sleep away sometimes
They give it back again. Soft sleeves of sound
Attend the darkling harbor, the pillowed bay;
Somewhere out there in blankness steam

Spills into steam, and wanders, washed away
— Flurried by keen fifings, eddied
Among distant chiming buoys — adrift. The sky,
Cool feathery fold, suspends, distills
This wavering slumber.... Slowly —
Immemorially the window, the half-covered chair
Ask nothing but this sheath of pallid air.

recalls you to
your love,
there in a
waking dream
to merge
your seed

And you beside me, blessèd now while sirens
Sing to us, stealthily weave us into day —
Serenely now, before day claims our eyes
Your cool arms murmurously about me lay.

While myriad snowy hands are clustering at the panes —

your hands within my hands are deeds;
my tongue upon your throat — singing
arms close; eyes wide, undoubtful
dark
drink the dawn —
a forest shudders in your hair!

— with whom?

The window goes blond slowly. Frostily clears.
From Cyclopean towers across Manhattan waters
— Two — three bright window-eyes aglitter, disk
The sun, released — aloft with cold gulls hither.

Who is the
woman with
us in the
dawn?...
whose is the
flesh our feet
have moved
upon?

The fog leans one last moment on the sill.
Under the mistletoe of dreams, a star —
As though to join us at some distant hill —
Turns in the waking west and goes to sleep.