Dogtown and Other Homes: Poems
When my mother describes Cape Ann’s shape on a map, she says it’s a thumb pointing out to sea. If Cape Ann is a thumb, Dogtown is its fingerprint: all whorls and grooves nestled in the thumb’s center.
Mom and I hike Dogtown often. When I say “hike,” though, I may be giving us too much credit. What we really do is wander. We leave home intending to follow a specific route, but inevitably a shadowed grove or hidden swamp calls and leads us off-trail. Our Wordsworth-esque wanderings may be due to our love of the overgrown, our poor senses of direction, or the beckoning of a ghost; whatever the reason, we leave Dogtown feeling refreshed, albeit a little scared.
My obsession with Dogtown started before I ever got lost on its trails. I was particularly intrigued by its early history, when it was home to those marginalized by the larger community: impoverished widows, manumitted persons, accused witches, trans femmes, and sex workers. As I researched their centuries-old stories and wandered the present-day woods, I began to see its landscape as my foil. Writing about Dogtown’s history allowed me to uncover truths about myself as a poet and artist, teacher and human.
To me, Dogtown symbolizes empowerment and abandonment, freedom and seclusion. It asks us what happens when one is left to fend for oneself. It takes up space on Cape Ann’s thumb as it crumbles, quietly wild.
Read on for an excerpt from Rachel’s Dogtown poem sequence titled DOGTOWN AND OTHER HOMES.
Boulder: “COURAGE”
Those who mention Cornelius Finson
paint him against their sharp white
background: a man of intelligence,
evidently. They call him Black Neil,
say he counted fish in the Annisquam,
struck deals, slaughtered hogs.
I imagine his mornings
before Dogtown’s end:
each day, he woke to orange dawn
in the farthest corner of the woods.
If there was coffee, he drank it
beside Judy, the witch he loved—
together, they watched light
rake the green. Dogtown
was the only place he lived
free, the place he stayed
when the rest left for sea.
Alive and alone
in a freshly ghosted town,
he traced his walls’ veins
as his own, watched them
cave in, receded alongside them,
slept among slush and bugs.
Some dismissed it—said he stayed
to guard pirate treasure—
but what happens to home
after everyone’s gone? He didn’t ask
for saving—still, he was taken
shaking with old age and fright.
They didn’t know what it meant
to find freedom in solitude—
to answer the call of your body’s
basement, sing alone to the forest dark.
• • • • •
“Cornelius Finson was taken on a bitter day in winter...Within seven days Neil was dead.”
—Charles E. Mann, In the Heart of Cape Ann, or the Story of Dogtown
“I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.”
—Zora Neale Hurston
Boulder: “IF WORK STOPS VALUES DECAY”
Finnish lore says man began in gentleness, born from nature:
the earth an egg, its yolk the sun—freckles of stars wedged
into sky. Constellations scattered like powder.
The cutters were hired desperate. Told to cleave rock daughters
of the moraine, scare starlings with their carbides,
sing deep metallic songs. Only diamonds turn nature’s
hardest stone to powder—
one granite slice fine as quarry silt, another
coarse as oat, flaking under wedge
like a bluefish supper. Men as messengers, ghost writers, wedge-
ing platitudes into Dogtown’s daughters.
Some letters carved perfect, a finger’s width thick, others
split by the heat of their carbides.
They walked home sugared in powder.
Gloucester nights, they sang tales to their sons and daughters,
sat in backyard smoke-saunas biding
time while neighbors and brothers
lost jobs and homes. Some said seawork was smoother—
better money, no time spent in dirt working against nature’s
will. But there’s art in how rock slides by carbide,
how they smoothed the edge
of each letter, their laughter
swallowed by trees. They came home to hot dog chowder,
hungry wives, sons and daughters.
• • • • •
“After the stock market tumbled in 1929, Roger Babson hired 35 unemployed Finnish stonecutters to carve inspirational phrases into Dogtown’s ancient boulders.”
—New England Historical Society
“From one half the egg… Grows the upper vault of Heaven; /
From the white part come the moonbeams, / From the yellow part the sunshine…”
—Kalevala: The Epic Poem of Finland
Rachel M. Dillon is a Boston-born poet living in New York City, where she teaches high school english. She is also the creator-curator of Shelf Life, a monthly newsletter of book reviews. Her work can be found in Publishers Weekly, HOOT Review, APIARY Magazine, and at rachelmdillon.com.