David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

David K. Leff's books about ordinary people, places and objects explore stories hidden in plain sight

NEW: Depth Of Field, Poems & Photographs

Depth of Field reads unlike any other poetry book.  In his second collection, David K. Leff continues weaving together the inner and the outer spheres of life, connecting personal striving, loss, and wonderment with the worlds of nature, cultural currents, and our collective past.  But stepping beyond words, he links verbal and visual experience with poems joined to his own sometimes stunning, sometimes poignant photographs.  Words and pictures partner to tell parallel stories amplifying the reader’s encounter. Purchase and read more about Depth Of Field at Antrim House, publisher.

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Are you a deep traveler?  Do you seek connections among the diverse phenomena you encounter daily?  Welcome to a space on the Web that explores the confluence between natural and cultural environments, that looks at the world in four dimensions, in time as well as space.  Please take a moment to look at David's books, read one of his essays or savor a few poems.  Find out where he's speaking next, or enjoy a slideshow of the last undiscovered place.

    

The Price of Water   |   The Last Undiscovered Place |   Deep Travel

Hunting for Doors

We use them every day, but they’re so familiar as to be hardly seen.  Fabricated for very practical  purposes, doorways are a necessary part of any building.  But in their design and construction they  convey messages that go well beyond the simplicity of their workaday purpose.  So on a whim last week I walked around my neighborhood to see what I could learn by some careful and conscious looking at doors.

Night Walk (poem)

Night is a well-worn coat I slip into,
wooly-plush and thick.  There’s a viscosity and weight
to the dark which feels as if it could be grasped and held.
It seems to stretch and absorb shock like a black
bolt of lycra fabric.  Animal-eyed stars peer coldly,
and shadows multiply in moonlight, sharpened or faded
with lunar phases, but always leaving the distance
between the object and opaque indistinct.

With irises starved for illumination smells and sounds
prolong and elongate, swell and bloat.  I breathe lilac
scent from blocks away and car exhaust lingers long
after the vehicle departs.  Owl-hoot from deep woods
comes to me as clearly as a phone call and low
conversation from a down-street porch is whispered
just to me.  Uncertainty haunts every footstep testing texture
and slope, fingering gravel, pavement and grass like Braille.

Untethered to distinct sunlit surfaces, imagination wanders
with questions daylight so feebly answers.  The reflux
of dreams, last-chances, joys and shame arise like outcast
ghosts.  Fearing my own deeper darkness I navigate by dead
reckoning, relying on where I’ve been to know where I’m
going.  Splashing into hidden puddles of memory, I’m
forever cowering beneath blankets during Dad’s drunken
rants, dropping a ball to schoolyard taunts, cutting my son’s
umbilical, squeezed by the desperate gravity of divorce,
breathing a mountain peak’s panoramic revelation.

My body’s diminished by dark, absorbed into a shadowy
landscape of rocks, trees, roads and structures
where thoughts ferment, darting dimly across expectations
like a deer leaping into headlights on an unlit road.
There’s nothing dismal or dreary in darkness, no gloom
or melancholy, only a self left stranded without the eyes’
acute surveillance.  In a sudden adrenalin charge
I find incandescence and discovery, for night
is not just a later hour or light’s absence, but a disguise
revealing what cannot be seen by day.

Bringing the Outside Indoors

I enjoy spending time outside.  So it’s no surprise that I like bringing the outdoors inside.  And the best way to do so is with a few carefully selected objects accidentally found along roads, on out-of-the-way trails, at riverbanks and tidal wrack lines, or while bushwhacking over ledges and through thickets.  Such odds and ends typically have little value except to the finder for whom they are infused the joy of discovery, the memory of adventure, and the intimacy of having had something in hand.  I display these small wonders on shelves, mantles, tables and almost any flat surface I can find at home.

At the Sign of the Giant Hot Dog

Driving in unfamiliar territory at lunchtime, I was famished and cruising for a place to grab a bite.  Despite being on the alert for food, I would have missed a tiny gem of a take-out eatery if not for the sign.  It wasn’t a brightly colored internally lit piece of plastic or beckoning twists of colored neon that caught my eye, but a rather large, rough cut wooden hot dog with a streak of mustard across the top and a phone number emblazoned on the bun.  I made a hard, sudden turn into the next driveway without even having seen the restaurant.