David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

In the Cemetery of Dreams (poem)

Half its panels missing, the giant screen framed in rusting
skeletal steel faces an audience of autumn olive thickets,
tangled bittersweet and grape vines.  Posts once uttering
laughter, gunshots and music have long lost their voice,
and the block concession stand that scented dank
summer evenings with popcorn and French fries
is a crater of concrete chunks, wires and pipes.

Fords and Chevys hungering for dusk and flickering larger-
than-life magic once crowded this gravel lot head to tail
light.  Backseat-cozy in footed pajamas with my sisters,
we watched Disney’s Dalmatians and Bond battling
Goldfinger as Dad shushed our giggles.  Wrapped
around a leggy girl years later, I parked by the far fencerow
of pines, barely noticing Yousarian’s wheedling.

In this arena of illusion I rode Dr. Zhivago’s train,
landed on a planet of apes where Liberty lay ruined
on a beach, eavesdropped on the Godfather’s irrefusable
offers, bopped to the happy world of Grease, fell prey
to apocalypse in Nam.  Soundtrack and Technicolor
merged with moonlight, clicking crickets, and the tang
of damp from a nearby swamp.

Gazing dizzily at the battered, blank expanse of white,
I see Brando with puffed cheeks and dark suit, dreams
replaying like previews in this ruined Serengeti of imagination
where hawks stare from broken light posts and sparrows
and warblers flit through brush.  The screen’s a great occluded
eye staring vacantly, looking at me as I once looked at it.
And still showing tonight are the only stars worth a wish.

Winter Trees (poem)

No longer buzzed on chlorophyll or tarted-up with autumn
colors, winter trees are a ragged lot.  Few branch out
with the graceful lines of field guide silhouettes.  Gnarled,
leaning with tropisms, bulging with goitrous growths,
hollowed and cracked, they’re shaped by disease, struggles
for light and water.

I like walking the streets with skeletal boughs arcing
darkly against the sky as they creak and groan
in a freezing wind.  They seem misplaced hanging
over a manufactured world of cars and macadam,
streetlights, and carefully built houses striving to deny
nature’s trademark imperfection.

My face reddened and parched by January gusts, I duck
into a tavern moist and warm as a greenhouse, smoky
and humming with conversation punctuated by laughter.
No calendar hunks or cover girls are clutching long-necks
and doing shots at the bar.  But among the thin lips, wispy
hair, crooked noses and scarred skin, stories grow like trees.

Always Watching: A Cold War Memory (poem)

My father’s fear smelled like rancid sweat
as he whispered to mom about a fireball and Cuban
missiles.  At school we practiced duck and cover,
cowering beneath battered wooden desks
built with inkwells from a time when pens were dipped.
Hands holding a bent head, my heart beat between the ears.

Nike was watching, always ready, computers
and radar scanning the sky, missiles primed
against Soviet bombers.  Soldiers hunkered down
in bunkers were wired on coffee, fully alive
on adrenalin, and waiting for the ultimate.

With warheads long gone, kids now play at Nike
Park, wearing shoes with a trademark swoosh.
They run around ball fields, sprinkling the air
with laughter and shouts in a spot where radar towers
once stood guard and waited.  A low, boxy block building
where uniformed men used to bend over panels of lights
and buttons is decorated with a bright mural depicting
smiling children, blue sky, an arcing rainbow and lush,
deep green trees.  Nike Tykes is a safe and supportive preschool,
where children can be independent, curious and creative.
The sirens are silent, for now.

Island of the Dead (poem)

Will the dead rest in peace on a stranded island of grass
and trees amidst a Gobi of striped parking?  Big boxes built
to the edge of their oasis hawk televisions, computers,
golf clubs and hot tubs for needs they never imagined.
At the final trumpet blast they’ll want for nothing.

Gas stations and fast food joints flaunting signs of bright,
come-hither plastic stare across six car-clogged lanes.
Eighteen-wheel diesels rumble at loading docks in night’s
hellish glow of metal halide and high pressure sodium.

Theme park of mortality by day, gloomy after sundown,
this green smudge on the crisp geometry
of commerce can’t be good for business.  Wouldn’t
this cul-de-sac of the deceased be happier in a green pasture
where the Lord still shepherds?

Slates, marbles, granites and sandstones are tilted and frost-
gnawed, rain-washed letters fading to anonymity.  Besides,
we no longer tolerate names like Mathias, Octavius,
Phineas, Sevilla and Zenas.  Mourners long gone, only
historians and hobbyists nurture an orphaned past.

The geography surrounding eternity is hardly what it was:
quiet tedium, hibernation of lusts.  Forever is a vibrating
wire of sizzling electrons, just another restless place
in the neighborhood.

Winter Flowers (poem)

Caged by short days of cold and foreshortened shadows,
you see a hardened, desiccated season of barren
tree limbs and a garden of dried khaki plant stems
whose papery rustle sounds like summer’s insects.
Memories of campanula, helenium, columbine,
achillea, foxglove and aster are the cordwood
that warms you, weapons keeping frost at bay.

I prize winter’s flowers, fragile and delicate,
blooming at roadside rock-cuts.  Frozen waterfalls,
hanging tusks and soda straws, cauliflower mounds
and scallop shells glow like moonbeams, veins
beneath pale winter skin, or translucent tourmalines
in rust, green and pink.   Reflecting and refracting
the slightest light, they magnify a weakened sun.

Time and Materials (poem)

Sandwiched between highway and river
lies a mountain of confounded dreams
rising to ridge and pinnacle from a once
swampy ravine.  Built of time
and materials, sometimes a mattress,
black plastic bags, or shards of cloth bleed
from bloated, grassy slopes.

This cemetery of the wasted and unwanted,
the broken and obsolete is an accidental time
capsule layered in decades of coal ash,
patent medicine bottles, ceramic chunks,
brass buttons, rusted pails, shoe leather,
animal bones and machine parts, a seething
stew of forgotten stories the future may discover.

Soaring with the defiance of pyramids
and mystery of Indian mounds
these tombs of trash will outlive the downtown
towers and suburban homes feeding
this collective collage, these living dead things
once working and beautiful,
now percolating gas and poison water.

I wonder about the newspapers and paint
cans, egg shells, the broken baseball
bat, hole riddled tee shirts, and dead
house plants.  Rest in peace stuff used
up or without further use.  I thought all
had disappeared when the packer truck pulled
from the curb, but what we leave lives.

The Housatonic at West Cornwall (poem)

There’s no tonic like the Housatonic.
                             Oliver Wendell Holmes

Shadowed by green humped hills,
anglers cast into riffles
and pocket-water where trout
linger among rocks, rising for flies
with concentric ripple kisses.
Carefully they wade over cobbles
as swallow acrobats dart
and swoop for insects.

Absorbed in the swash and roll
of the river as it seethes beneath
the barn-red covered bridge,
they briefly awaken to the rhythmic
rumble of tires on dry boards.

Occasionally they pull magic
from the water like a dream hauled
from the depths of sleep, glistening
silver, rainbowed or stippled in lucent
pink, orange and yellow.

But every shining, defiant beauty
is returned before drowning in air,
as PCBs secretly poison sediments
where the miracle electric age chemical
bringing “good things to life” lies
layered like fossils, marking a time
when fish were turned to forbidden
fruit contaminated by knowledge.

Bloodroot (poem)

Tempting frost and spring snows, fragile bloodroot
stalks push through still cold soil.  Scalloped leaves
clasp delicate stems like hands shielding them from
a chill.

White-petaled flowers surrounding a golden-orange eye
spread through gardens, grow in thick
patches along streams and in the dark earth of damp
woodlands.  Blossoms blink at the sky, opening with
dawn and closing at dusk.  As the blooms fade,
the bluish-green leaves grow larger, their palms open
to heaven.

Natives painted faces with the bloody root juice,
dyed baskets and clothes and drove away insects.
Drops on sugar cubes quieted the coughs
of colonists.  This reddish sap relieved the warts, sinus
congestion, fungal rashes and infected wounds
of many old-time farmers.  Clustered by a back door
or found in still leafless forests, the sight of these plants
cures any stasis left from the season past and brings
us eagerly to the verge.