John Smith was a mercenary or

John Smith Will Not Return to Jamestown
"I call them my children, for they have been my wife, my hawks, my hounds, my cards, my dice, and in total, my best content, as indifferent to my heart as my left hand to my right."

This evening, the birds row across the sky in a way
that is not English. At dinner, it begins. I begin

to suspect I have not been here so long,
nor was I always so tired. Winter scratches clear

claws on the window, and that old dream,
back again. Somewhere the Powhatan savages

step naked into the sleet, through stick woods,
the fall line tight at their throats. They are narrow;

deep as creeks, and that white thrust of air does not touch them
the air loves them--

as they slip between gray dogwood without a sound.
I see them clean skin from a man

with only the opalescent light of freshwater mussel shells
and who else knows anything

about where the tuckahoe tubers nudge their dark thumbs
under the frosted crust of the world? Alone now

in the homeland, I consult my litany of survival,
with the cheese, the bread unattended on my plate: my hands

go on getting old. Virginia, offer the cup
of wasps, black and shining, to my lips,

lay me down again on the rock.