David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

The Voices of Trucks

Every truck has its individual sound, whether moving along the pavement or at idle.  Like a birdwatcher identifying various species by their song, I’ve no need to look out the window to know what teamster-borne commerce is flowing through my neighborhood.  Each vehicle has its own voice expressed by its engine, brakes, doors, backup alarm and other elements.

Woodpecker Telegraph

On a walk through the old and moldering Collins axe factory a few days ago I stopped short on hearing a rhythmic rapping punctuating an atmosphere suffused with distant traffic sounds and the whine of leaf blowers.  Listening and looking around for a few moments, I at last spied a downy woodpecker banging its beak against the gable of a wooden elevator shaft rising over three stories beside a hulking stone edifice that stands like a fortress at the edge of the Farmington River.  Built in the mid 1840s, it’s said to be the oldest stone factory building in the State of Connecticut.

Cake, Champagne, and a Dead Poet's Birthday

Dead more than half a century, Wallace Stevens hardly needs anyone to celebrate his birthday.  Born on October 2, 1879, he hasn’t enjoyed one since 1954, having left this world the following year at age 75.   But it was cake and champagne among the stacks and study carrels of the Hartford Public Library  recently for the Sixteenth Annual Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash thanks to the library and the small cadre of devotees who keep the poet’s legacy alive under the auspices of The Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens.  Former Poet Laureate of the United States Robert Pinsky capped the gathering of about fifty people by reading both selections from Stevens’ work and his own, a fabled living poet by his voice breathing life into another long dead.

Crows (poem)

Silky black, forever caged in silhouette, crows gossip
loudly from power lines, their raucous caw, caw, cah
clatter an obnoxious ring-tone left unanswered.

Stealing from cornfields, feasting at dumpsters,
brazenly picking apart bloody roadkill in traffic,
they make good livings as our shadows.

Defying scarecrows, poisons and shotguns, they serve
as harbingers of doom, creation myth stars, couriers
to gods and nightmare horror film fliers.

Freighted with metaphor, psychic riddles of light and dark,
symbols of compensation and demise, it’s a wonder
these birds can fly.