David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

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.

I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; . . . I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.

    ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

New Book!

Echoes from Walden: Poems Inspired by Thoreau's Life and Work

See Henry David Thoreau in a Whole New Way: Through the Eyes of Poets

For More About this Book Click: HERE

 

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.

I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; . . . I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.

    ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

New Book!

Echoes from Walden: Poems Inspired by Thoreau's Life and Work

See Henry David Thoreau in a Whole New Way: Through the Eyes of Poets

For More About this Book Click: HERE

 

More than Where to Go: Distinctive Road Signs

They tell us where we are and where to go. What more could we want from standard street and roadside directional signs? Ubiquitous in our car culture, we pass one after another even on   short drives. Taken for granted, they’re truly noticed and appreciated them only when one is missing or we’ve lost our way. Like anyone else, I rely on them wherever I go. I don’t doubt their   value. But what really grabs my attention is a sign out of the ordinary.

Almost universally made of reflective, adhesive vinyl pasted over aluminum, standard street and directional signs are perfectly utilitarian, relatively easy to read and understand. There are slight variations in typography, color, or the presence of government seals, but the monotony of off-white lettering on a green background is the rule. Yet every once in a while, I pass signs that buck the lookalike trend. Whether they supplement or substitute for regulation signs, they convey much more about a place than names and distances. Distinctive signs may speak to creativity, history, a sense of humor, or a special notion of place. To sight one is to feel you’re in a singular community.

Paintbrush and Rifle (poem)

Lowering binoculars, I look down
at my Audubon field guide and confirm
the sighting—a golden-crowned kinglet
high in a shaggy Norway spruce.
Gazing again through the lenses,
I imagine John James Audubon peering
along the site of his Long Tom rifle.

Silencing birds with bullets,
he made them immortal in luminous
brushstrokes, posing them so lifelike
with wires they seem to dance,
colors so vivid the images sing
loudly in whistles, trills, liquid
warbles, and harsh corvid cries.

Brand name for protecting birds,
mammals, reptiles and fish, swamps,
grasslands and mountainsides,
he taught us to see a wonderstruck
utility in beauty and forget the blood-
stained paints, the killing that saved,
enabling us to repent in his name.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Audubon, painted by John Syme, 1826

Tree Messages

        These trees shall be my books and in their barks my thoughts.
                Shakespeare, As You Like It

Why do some people carve messages and images into trees? Do words and sketches on a living thing enliven the thought, give it vibrancy lacking on other surfaces? Perhaps drawing on sylvan skin shares in the mystique of tattoos.

Gouging the bark of a tree is a form of vandalism I don’t condone. Whether conifer or hardwood, it leaves its victims vulnerable to insects and disease. Why would anyone endanger a lifeform that puts oxygen into the air merely to post a message? Trees may be usefully cut for house framing, furniture, and fuel, but to incise the bark just to mark one’s presence seems an unnecessary imposition of ego, at best. Nevertheless, some tree carvings intrigue me with synergies that connect natural objects and human expression.

Everyone’s seen carving on the smooth, smoke-gray bark of beech trees. Call them social register trees, they often bear names, dates, initials, hearts, and other designs. Analogous in some ways to canine-like behavior, apparently there are people who can’t help but mark their territory with knifepoints on bark. To those who admire the vigor and quirky growth habits of trees as an antidote to the regularity and endless written messages of the built environment, carvings seem self-defeating. A tree trunk is not meant to be a postcard.

Birdsong (poem)

        Nearly one-third of the wild birds in the United States and Canada have vanished since 1970.
                                                Fitzpatrick & Marra, The New York Times, 9/19/2019

I awaken to ghost birds,
my ears ringing with dawn choruses past—
robins, finches, warblers, thrushes, and wrens
erupting in melodies so loud and full I could not think,
my mind carried on a freshet of sound.

This morning is no silent spring,
but a season muffled, slowly choked of breath,
a boisterous choir fading to an ensemble
of sweet chirps and whistles,
not the wall of sound I heard as a boy.

Connecting earth, air and water,
wings and hollow bones morph to totems, portents.
Is there freedom or courage without eagles,
mystery absent owls peering into darkness,
peace and healing minus the grace of cranes?

I need no homing pigeons
when hushed birdsong augurs anxiety and awe,
messages me on the planet’s health.
Must every feathered thing be a canary,
every backyard, street corner and hilltop a coal mine?

In Praise of Cobbles

Stone cobbles are the most elemental of construction materials. No two structures built of them are exactly the same. Endlessly fascinating for their unique appearance, I’m on the lookout wherever I go, and often stop and stare at homes and public buildings, foundations, streets, commemorative arches and monuments, even porch railings and flower planters.

Cobbles are smooth, naturally rounded rocks not much bigger than what most people can easily carry. Webster defines them as “larger than a pebble and smaller than a boulder often arbitrarily limited by geologists to a size ranging from 64 to 256 millimeters in diameter,” about two-and-a-half to ten inches. They were ground down, polished, and then dropped by the glacier that retreated from my area in southern New England about 12,000 years ago. Today, they are most easily found in streambeds and along lake and sea shores, exposed by the erosive power of water. They also arise from tilled fields by frost action, appearing like fossilized potatoes.