Poems

Excerpt

THE PILOT’S STORY.

I.

It was a story the pilot told, with his back to his hearers,––

Keeping his hand on the wheel and his eye on the globe of the jack-staff,

Holding the boat to the shore and out of the sweep of the current,

Lightly turning aside for the heavy logs of the drift-wood,

Widely shunning the snags that made us sardonic obeisance.

II.

All the soft, damp air was full of delicate perfume

From the young willows in bloom on either bank of the river,––

Faint, delicious fragrance, trancing the indolent senses

In a luxurious dream of the river and land of the lotus.

Not yet out of the west the roses of sunset were withered;

In the deep blue above light clouds of gold and of crimson

Floated in slumber serene; and the restless river beneath them

Rushed away to the sea with a vision of rest in its bosom;

Far on the eastern shore lay dimly the swamps of the cypress;

Dimly before us the islands grew from the river’s expanses,––

Beautiful, wood-grown isles, with the gleam of the swart inundation

Seen through the swaying boughs and slender trunks of their willows;

And on the shore beside us the cotton-trees rose in the evening,

Phantom-like, yearningly, wearily, with the inscrutable sadness

Of the mute races of trees. While hoarsely the steam from her ’scape-pipes

Shouted, then whispered a moment, then shouted again to the silence,

Trembling through all her frame with the mighty pulse of her engines,

Slowly the boat ascended the swollen and broad Mississippi,

Bank-full, sweeping on, with tangled masses of drift-wood,

Daintily breathed about with whiffs of silvery vapor,

Where in his arrowy flight the twittering swallow alighted,

And the belated blackbird paused on the way to its nestlings.

III.

It was the pilot’s story:––“They both came aboard there, at Cairo,

From a New Orleans boat, and took passage with us for Saint Louis.

She was a beautiful woman, with just enough blood from her mother

Darkening her eyes and her hair to make her race known to a trader:

You would have thought she was white. The man that was with her,––you see such,––

Weakly good-natured and kind, and weakly good-natured and vicious,

Slender of body and soul, fit neither for loving nor hating.

I was a youngster then, and only learning the river,––

Not over-fond of the wheel. I used to watch them at monte,

Down in the cabin at night, and learned to know all of the gamblers.

So when I saw this weak one staking his money against them,

Betting upon the turn of the cards, I knew what was coming:

They never left their pigeons a single feather to fly with.

Next day I saw them together,––the stranger and one of the gamblers:

Picturesque rascal he was, with long black hair and moustaches,

Black slouch hat drawn down to his eyes from his villanous forehead.

On together they moved, still earnestly talking in whispers,

On toward the forecastle, where sat the woman alone by the gangway.

Roused by the fall of feet, she turned, and, beholding her master,

Greeted him with a smile that was more like a wife’s than another’s,

Rose to meet him fondly, and then, with the dread apprehension

Always haunting the slave, fell her eye on the face of the gambler,––

Dark and lustful and fierce and full of merciless cunning....