David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

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.

Plesant Valentine (poem)

The cemetery’s sweetest name sleeps beside
a stone wall where eighteen-wheelers
shudder the ground at a hard turn.  On a simple

granite monument only that name invites
curiosity where facts survive the grave
no better than flesh and bone.  Virginia

born and black in 1848, slavery
was a legacy for this runaway teen
fighting under stars-and-bars, awaiting

a heart-thumping run to the blue
where he simmered stew and fried
bacon for Union soldiers.  At war’s

end he bounced around milking
cows, haying, chopping wood
and building fences.  By sweat,

sore muscles and scrimping over
a decade he bought his own place,
a spacious white house edged

in pickets where he grew well-to-do
and hosted meals for the down-and-out.
Profiting in real estate and mortgages,

he kept cutting oak, maple,
and chestnut to make charcoal.
I imagine the proud old collier sleeping

beside the smoldering mounds
of slowly charring wood chunks,
his smudged face as black as ever.

January Thaw

Weeks of determined walking, muscles arched against icy
gusts, have dissolved in an overnight wash of softened air.
Cold crawls up my leg from the still starched ground, but I’ve
slowed, lavishing time on robins hopping amid
a gauntlet of snow patches.

I’m loose jointed, giddy with rushing blood.  No longer
imprisoned by frost, the planet slackens with rotting leaf scents
and the tick-tock of water sliding from roofs toward gurgling
storm drains.  Corners of every mouth thaw, smiles
semaphore what words might renounce.

We want to believe.  But before long the ground will tighten
like a healing scar, we’ll soon again hunker deep in our coats.
Knowing winter’s return is as inevitable as broken
engagements and bounced checks, we horde these hours
like coins to spend in our own seasons of confounding hope.

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.

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.

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.

Believing is Seeing (a poem about America's most recognized painting)

Posed with a pitchfork
before a board-and-batten, steep gabled cottage
with a pointed window, the American Gothic
couple gazes from the canvass in eternal taciturnity.

In the hushed, polished halls of downtown
Chicago hangs this two-faced symbol
of gritty, rural resourcefulness
and small-town rigidity.

I stand among millions who’ve stared back, unsure
what I’m seeing, caught between a kitsch joke
and a culture hungry for something deep, enduring
and blessed by high art.

A little battered and alligatored with old
paint, the structure still sits as Grant Wood
sketched it in a whimsical stop-the-car
moment.  Having already been there without traveling,

I walked around amazed at its sudden
three-dimensionality, the sky as pale and luminous
as the painter’s pigment.  I conjured
the grim-faced iconic couple out front, knowing

they never lived there, weren’t paired
or even painted together.  But the artist’s sister and dentist
were destined to stand just beyond the porch,
married forever in a sacred, fractured authenticity

Not so much a painting as a mirror, this American
Sphinx is Old Glory and Miss Liberty,
has marketed greeting cards and television shows,
sold cereal and promoted politicians.

Patriotic fairytale more real than an Eldon, Iowa
house or two people who sat for their portraits,
it tells us stories we are starved to hear
because what we believe is what we see.

Extra Innings On Staten Island (a 9/11 poem)

At ninety miles per hour, Schafer’s fastball slams
with a pop into the deep leathery mouth of the
catcher’s mitt.  The scent of grilling sausages hangs
in summer’s searing heat.  Brooklyn’s Bouchard
grounds to shortstop and cheers rise like smoke into
the cloudless sky from this cozy concrete horseshoe
of a stadium.

Over the outfield wall massive tankers and
container ships carrying bright steel canisters pass
as silently as icebergs along the Kill Van Kull.  The
harbor beyond is herringboned with whitecaps and
busy with tugs pushing barges and fishing trawlers
with their nets reeled on deck.  The boxy ferry
crosses and recrosses past the grand green lady as she
stands sentry before the City’s shimmering cliffs, its
mesas and buttes of masonry, its columns of glass
and steel that are filing cabinets of humanity.  But
the twin towers of dark glass still haunt like the pain
of an amputee’s phantom limb.

Anxiety spread like flu on that day when the sky was
an azure arc in which a centerfielder could lose a fly.
We gathered around televisions repeatedly watching
the cartoonish unreality of the plane, the explosion
of flames and slowly coiling gray smoke.  Fear-
contorted faces filled streets darkened by the black
rain of debris.  Bridges filled with pedestrians.
Tearful men and women held pictures of the
missing.

Jostled by catcalls and shouts, I’m back with Lovett
at the bat.  On a hit-and-run he puts the ball in play,
allowing Grote to slide safely at third.  Tie score
and I wonder if Brewer can bunt, can execute the
suicide squeeze.  He’s an unknown on a roster filled
with untested names like Cuello, Nutt, Granke,
and Gonell.  Any could be the next Ruth whose
legendary bat will lift a nation.  But Brewer’s caught
looking at a pitch on the inside corner, and I get up
to grab a sausage against the uncertainty of extra
innings.