Slant Light Poets

1

Cicadas, geese on the river, crickets at the back door.
In those places where 
humans have long chosen to live,
the days are family
and the voices
are in the air for the hearing.

 

2

I’ve lived in point of Rocks for over thirty years. I remember one Halloween, when we watched all the kids come around the hill like a train of flashlights it reminded me of Charlie Brown’s Great Pumpkin.
My family is from Finland.

 1832: the race between the canal and the railroad for the narrow stretch between here and Harper’s Ferry was settled in court. The B&O won with Daniel Webster as their lawyer. 

In ’35 Charles Johnson’s surveyors were here laying out streets for a town. In ’42 slaves from the Duval Plantation were building St. Paul’s Episcopal.
The voices are in the air for the hearing.

The horn they blow on the boat is a call for the lock tender.

Dan Phillips said the Blue Lodge, home to the Masons since 1898, was used for the town offices for a time. They used to hold dances until the stage became the kitchen in this building “where good men are made better.”

Marilyn Mille, a plein air artist, knows the former pastor of The Solid Rock Church. He once lived on her Woodsboro farm. She says the new pastor is a woman.

 In 1836 the B&O Baltimore issued a rule that the steam engines had to be shut down and horses pull the trains past here because of how badly the locomotives frightened the mules.

After a heavy rain the snakes would come up on the path. Horses would go crazy. Our mules were not as afraid. I complained to my father about the snakes and he told me to get up on the trailing mule and ride.

The Fox family were canal boat people in the late 1800s: boatmen, captains and lock tenders up at lock 29. Joe Snyder was a captain there, too. 

 

3

A lady from the local dance troop told us around tax time the bluebells bloom near here by a sycamore grove.

It’s a loop, the trainmaster says. The tank car trains of Bakkan oil going East to the refineries and ports are well North of us, along the great lakes and through Upstate New York. It is the empty cars that return through Point of Rocks, Brunswick and Cumberland to Ohio and the Mid-West.
The ethanol trains through here eastbound, though, are loads for Baltimore, Richmond and Newport News.

The peepers on spring mornings, too… Voices.

They would give us a couple weeks’ notice and drain the canal around December. The boats that weren’t in drydock just sat on the bottom. We got to go to school for a couple months. They filled it again when the bluebirds came back in April.

A dollar a ton for coal Cumberland to Georgetown.

Zhanna told us in eighth grade she and her friend made a documentary film called “The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal: Opportunities Within.” They interviewed Rangers at the park office and did voice-overs of scenery on the canal and river.

The Masons’ Lodge flooded to the ceiling. The families took the furniture home to keep it dry as it wouldn’t fit up the narrow stairs.

Lida and Lizzy Dutton and their cousin Sarah Steer wrote a pro-union newspaper behind Confederate lines in Waterford of Loudoun County.  With wit, humor and courage they defied Stonewall Jackson and Colonel Mosby’s Raiders to give encouragement to the Union soldiers here.
Somehow the Waterford News got smuggled to Baltimore, printed, and sent by rail to the Point of Rocks Post office.

Samuel Means, the B&O Stationmaster was another abolitionist from Waterford who formed a Troop of Union Rangers here. 

At night father would sleep in the cabin and my sister and I would ride the mules. Father wanted us to sing the whole time so if he woke up he would know we were still there.

A lady let me pet her dog. Its name was Snickers.

We offered a little girl a poem for free. She said no thanks.

In these places where humans have long chosen to live
poets wake up at night
and the years are singing
and we know they are still there.

 

Slant Light Poets at “Art at the Point” 2019