David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Quarry Visits

I’m not sure where the expression “stony silence” comes from, but it clearly has nothing to do with the people harvesting building stone from Connecticut’s quarries.  At the Stony Creek Granite Quarry in Branford and the Portland Brownstone Quarry in its namesake town, rarely have I met people so enthused about their work.  They recite the geology of their product as if it were a personal genealogy.  The structures built of their stone are spoken of like distant relatives.  They see themselves in a lineage of architectural craftsmanship stretching back centuries.

Portland’s quarry, which produces a rich, chocolaty toned sandstone, is probably the oldest active quarry site in the nation.  Work began in the 1690s, and at the height of the stone’s popularity in the late 19th  century it was the most common building material for row house residences in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Boston.  Stony Creek granite, a luminous pink stone laced with black highlights, was most famously used in the Statue of Liberty’s base, and is also found in such grand buildings as Boston’s South Station and Chicago’s Newberry Library.

Portland’s quarry overlooks large historic pits now filled with emerald water beneath dramatic 100 foot cliffs.  The twin metal truss humps of the Arrigoni Bridge over the Connecticut River frame the horizon.  The Stony Creek site is surrounded with rugged, permanently preserved forestland and abandoned quarries.

Standing in the quarry pits below towering sheer walls and surrounded by 25 ton stone blocks is humbling.  I’d never have thought a hole in the ground could be so intriguing, but they are radiant with light bouncing off exposed rock sparkling with color.  I’m awed that such rough material is shaped into the many forms buildings demand.  In far flung places people inhabit this bedrock, the very stuff of the planet on which we walk with little thought.

Alarms of Calm

Church bells, fire engine sirens, door buzzers, telephone ringtones and other noises designed to interrupt and disturb can also foster tranquility.  Let such sounds remind us to return to our breath, suggests zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. Even alarms can be clarions to concentrate on the now, as warnings for calm.  Maybe the competing confusions and complexities of this rapidly accelerating life can be harnessed to help us find sanity and balance if we approach at an odd angle. 

Full Moonrise

A peachy light at dusk.  Pink almost.  It's as if the Cat in the Hat had come back once again on a snowless day and atomized his legendary bathtub ring into the atmosphere.

Sitting at the edge of the Farmington River, darkness comes on gradually like sleep to a restless body.  The soft evening air soothes, liberates the mind to wander like a dog off leash.  I watch the moon working its way in silvery fragments through the tangle of tree branches on the opposite shore until at last it rises like a balloon over the dark horizon of lumpy, leafy crowns.  It floats in a gauze of thin, wispy clouds, some that stripe its face like contrails.

The river which had been dark and disappearing now gleams.  As the moon rises this night grows brighter.  Shadows that had evaporated without illumination have returned.  But the moon seems to have brought more than just light.  There's a glow that adheres to surfaces like a soft, fuzzy, sticky dust.  The dullest objects glory in it.

The moon reflects on and from the water.  It seems there are two moons.  One is suspended above and another just below the liquid surface.  The river seems to magnify the light like a lens.

Street Sounds

Sounds are signatures, identfiers, a species of audio trademark.  Like smells, they can lurk mysteriously in our consciousness evoking strong memories or dreams at odd and unsuspecting moments.  They have a power to stir us far beyond the tidy outlines of sight.

No one is amazed that an outdoorsperson can identify birds by their calls or know the needs of a squirrel or coyote by the noises they make.  Why should we think it weird that urban and suburban dwellers can discern their neighbors by the sound of their idling car or the whoosh of tires on pavement?  The mail van, garbage truck, landscaper's trailer, and UPS vehicle all make sounds as distinctive as their missions.  More often than we think, we know what's going on without looking up.

Goodbye

Down a grassy slope the casket rode a wave of clutching
hands, a gauntlet of grim-faced mourners facing each other
with moist, vacant eyes.  Earth’s open mouth exhaled cool
and pungent, the dank humidity scented with freshly planed
pine.  My handful of soil thudded on the box
as hollowly as the silence of your voice.

Wiping dusty hands, I stood shaded by an oak
whose bare branches months ago were nervous
with Pine Siskins clinging like living leaves
when the ground was sealed with frost and crusted
with snow.  You should have been beside me, bent against
the stinging breeze, fingertips stiffening on cold binoculars.

Now you’ll always be here on the uneven verge
of this cattail-fringed pond where the rabbi chanted
Kaddish to the vibrato bass of bullfrogs
and springing konk-la-ree of redwings.  “Here I am,”
they said, calling for love and space,
singing your song.

You’re too much the activist for this staid subdivision
of the dead with its curving streets and manicured savannah
dotted with columns, obelisks, and urns.  Surely
you’ll get your neighbor Sam Colt tinkering, or J.P.
Morgan doing deals again.  Maybe you could rouse
Wallace Stevens to a stanza or Kate Hepburn to perform.

 

Witness

 

Twisted and wizened by time, buffeted with wind
and tattooed with lichen, muscular apple trees stand
in soldierly columns on a grassy crest.  Troops holding
the high ground, they watch over rows of lumpy, granite-
scarred ridges thick with oaks, dotted with new houses.
The old orchard owns a Realtor’s million dollar view.

Two screeching girls run beneath limbs heavy with Macs,
Baldwins, Macouns, Winesaps, Cortlands and Staymans,
their cheeks reddened like the glistening fruit hanging
with the promise of Christmas ornaments.  Among
the Ida Reds and Empires, a tall, white-haired man dried
as jerky stretches into branches he climbed as a boy,
grasping for a jewel just beyond reach.

As saplings, the trees were sentinels in a view quilted
with hayfields and corn, patched with woodlots and rocky
pasture where silos towered like castle keeps and Jersey’s
lowed.  In time they watched a weedy invasion
of hemlocks, hickories and pines grow tall with the fickle
flux of human intentions leaving stone walls threading
pointlessly through woods.

Street signs threatening like epitaphs, Apple Lane
and Orchard Avenue almost encircle this orderly island
with its unbroken cycle of bud, flower and fruit.  Down
slope the land is parceled, pocked by concrete
foundations and driveways, covered with asphalt roofs.
Still, the hillside’s final crop comes with the twisted fortune
that brings customers closer.

The tiring routines of prunings, sprayings, mowings,
and chasing hungry deer stirs a schoolteacher’s passion,
holds him tightly in the grip of their gravity and keeps
bulldozers distant.  A weekend stubble glisters on his
cheeks as he weighs my bag of Romes and Rhode Island
Greenings soon to be sliced between crusts.  Each October
we meet, steeping in the sweet smell of fresh cut grass
and pungent ripening where he takes in more than cash
and I much more than apples.

The Leather Man

Armored in coat, pants and high-crowned cap made
of old cowhide scraps stitched with coarse lacing,
the Leather Man ambled like a bear down village main
streets, by rumbling milltown falls, along farm
fields, and past woodlands.  Like a postman plodding
a regular route, he stopped at the same houses for meals
gladly given to glimpse a living fairytale.

Speaking hardly a grunt, animal ripe, he refused money,
slept in caves, his face smudged with grease and campfire
soot.  In large boots of leather patches fitted with spruce-
board soles, he walked a three-hundred-sixty-five mile orbit
every thirty-four days, predictable as a planet.

He seemed as if on a mission, pulled
by an appointment, determined to make a destination.  Who
knew his thoughts alone on lonely nights huddled
in his carapace of leather like a turtle drawn into its shell?
He left trails of questions like breadcrumbs.

His cyclic passage was a catechism, his presence
a dim mirror begging a careful look.  Who
was this uncouth, nameless wanderer with unkempt hair
who traveled light without address?  Where
had he come from?  Where was he going?
Such riddles were his calling card left at each doorstep,
with every sighting.
 

Pleasure Beach

Your face glowed on stage.  You bathed in applause
as if it washed off heartache as simply as water splashed
on dressing room powder.  But in the kitchen you played
a different part, acted as if I’d panned your performance.
You turned my burger and fries to tasteless props.

I longed for the actress to come home with me.  I coveted
her grace, hungered for her warm smile and sentences
that soothed like music.  But mom was a misbegotten role
you had to play.  I cheated you of the limelight as surely
as an understudy stealing the show.

During rehearsals I’d slip into the quiet carousel
where dusty horses dozed.  I’d dream of lights
and a thumping calliope, imagine the laughter and screams.
On my steed I hunted fox in a brass buttoned coat
and tracked bad guys beside John Wayne.

Summer stock died the day the island’s umbilical bridge
burned.   Moldering seats now sit in twilight
like an expectant audience, and the tent-like pavilion
where horses pranced is a skeletal shell where fleeting
memories sparkle in the shards of its broken windows.