Plimoth, during the next wave of plague

Pretending to be a colonizer forty hours a week

Isn’t a bad gig: you get a name, a real one,

Unlike the adolescent sows, and a backstory

Instead of a date with the butcher to become

Spare-ribs and chops. No one is assigned

Dorothy Bradford grappling with melancholia

Or a future she never wanted, choosing

The water, lingering down among the cast-off

Clamshells, more present yet than all the men

And their statues—

None of the windows

Have panes, only shutters, so the only mask

You need is your character, your insistence

You don’t know what a protractor is

While you explain the quadrant, the steel point

In your mind the whole time you talk

About right angles, how your high school drama

Coach would say you’re not inhabiting the role

Enough, colonizing the colonizer. Just adding

A syllable to the world question, quest-i-on,

And putting up with the bitch of worsted stockings.

Other places are hiring, bonuses abound, but the man

You are already died once and you’re fond of him

Now and the view of the cove, blue blue blue

From the meeting-house’s battlements, frames

Of film cut to the floor. They never fired once

On an enemy and what could they have accomplished

That pox didn’t, the pigs in the street ready to turn, run

Feral? You tell yourself it’s an electuary, the honey

Keeping it from spoiling, but you’ll be damned

If you come back next year, tell yourself it wasn’t

All a mistake, lie as you lie to the tourists, lie

Even when they don’t ask you anything, wandering by.