Packet boats

Horse-drawn boats
fourteen feet wide
and sixty to eighty feet long
carried passengers
on the Erie Canal
three hundred fifty miles
between Lake Erie
to the Hudson River
providing meals
and sleeping accommodations
and charging two cents per mile.
The railroad
put them out of business
in the later half
of the eighteen hundreds.
I’ve a good old mule
And her name of Sal.
Fifteen years on the Erie Canal.