David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

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.

Remembering Death at Roadside

Either roadside memorials are becoming increasingly common or I’m starting to notice them more as I age and feel my mortality.  Their bright colors and unusual shapes stick out at the pavement’s edge  where only the usual monotony of signs, guardrails, litter and leafy detritus are expected.

These street-side shrines are highly individual and their makeup reflects the life of the deceased and their loved ones.  Often short lived, they occasionally persist for years under the watchful eye of a friend or relative.  Some include religious icons and symbols while others might be decorated with beer or whiskey bottles, a deck of cards, or packs of cigarettes suggesting a secular and more flamboyant lifestyle.  Balloons, plastic and real flowers, photographs, stuffed animals, mirrors, medallions, coins, statues, whirligigs, pinwheels and gimcracks are typical.  The sites are unpredictable, spontaneous and often grow by accretion as new items are placed beside older ones.

Circles (poem)

Soaring like string-free kites, turkey vultures glide in lazy
circles with vee wings outstretched to feathered fingers.
Soothing, graceful silhouettes float on thermals, visible
shadows of winds that whistle through sooty

pinions.  But at roadside they stand like grisly flagmen,
picking at blood spattered raccoons, possums
and porcupines, their fleshy red-pink heads the color
of the decaying muscle and gristle they rip and devour.

Telescopic eyesight and nostrils that smell sour death
for miles are a vulture’s kite strings tied to lanes
of traffic set like a table with decaying
delicacies delivered by fenders and tires.  Ecological

undertakers, malodorous ministers of last rites
to the unburied, they dispose of the dead, scrub
the countryside and close a circle more spacious
than any traced in the sky.

Finding a Few Good Elms: in Search of Sylvan Elegance

The rumors of their disappearance are only slightly exaggerated.  Although rarely seen in colonnades anymore, single elm trees or small clusters still stand along roadsides, in parks, yards and on the grounds of institutions.  There’s a big one on State Route 30 across from the South Windsor firehouse, a huge umbrella of a tree near the main gate of the Woodstock Fair, and another close to the pavement on U.S. Route 44 in Pine Meadow.  Hartford’s High Street Elm, which looms seventy-nine feet over cracked parking lots, brush and a billboard in an inhospitable area just north of I-84, may be the most visible elm in New England.