David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Puffing Stacks

With temperatures sinking into the single digits these past few mornings the air seems so brittle that a modest wind might shatter the very atmosphere.   Cold causes chimneys and stacks to puff with visible exhalations that most times go undetected.  Every vent and duct connected to a furnace becomes a manufactory of clouds.

The pattern, contour and color of exhausts depend on the breeze, the fuel burned, and the height and shape of the stack.  I like seeing the smoke waft away and trail to spindly tendrils against the sky.  It’s akin to watching a dancing flame and is liable to produce the same delightful half-hypnotic state experienced staring into a fire.  Each flue is different and some seem to exhale like self-conscious cigarette smokers.

Though few people venture out in the frigid dawn, smoking chimneys are signs of life, of human activity hunkered in indoor warmth.  But going outside is well rewarded with a phenomenon reserved only for arctic-like mornings that also cause us to produce our own clouds with every breath.

Radio Poetry

Join David and River Valley Rhythms radio host Stephan Allison for a wide ranging discussion of poetry and the creative process.   David also reads a few poems and Stephan follows through with engaging commentary and questions.  Originally broadcast on WESU 88.1 fm in Middletown, Connecticut on January 28, 2010, the program is now available anytime and anywhere at:

http://www.archive.org/details/RiverValleyRhythmsShow60

Knowing What Time it Isn't

Carrying a cell phone means always having the time in brightly lit digital exactitude.  No wonder that younger folks who never developed the wristwatch habit don’t wear them.  They check the time by reaching into their coat or pants and looking at their cell.  In a way, it’s almost a century-old throwback to pocket watch days.

Regardless of convenience, I haven’t surrendered my watch.  It’s not out of affection for a particular timepiece or mere habit, but because my analog model does things no digital readout can.  Even though my watch is ordinary and inexpensive, it has a beauty to its heft, numerical display, and movement.  There’s a certain human aspect to its face and hands.  A Timex executive I spoke with recently acknowledged that it’s hard to design a digital watch that’s handsome because they are naturally two dimensional and black.  Expensive watches are generally analog because they can be works of art.

Digital watches also suffer the psychological disadvantage of giving only the current time.  What we really want to know when glancing at a watch is not just what time it is, but what time it is not.  We often want to see how much of the day has elapsed or how many minutes before our next appointment.  A traditional watch enables us to visualize time past and time forward in the divisions of hours and minutes on its face.  With hands in motion, the passage of time becomes almost palpable.

Inasmuch as the tools we use frame our perception of the world, I think I’ll stick by my analog watch.  Knowing the time at any given moment is not enough.

Snow Day

Swirling flakes paint visible wind gusts.  Pathways
disappear.  Piles of firewood, the kids’ sandbox,
and curbside trash cans change shape and fade into a photo
negative world.

Will a cup of milk and a few spoonfuls
of peanut butter make do in a house surging
with children while mom dreams of skis and hopes
her husband is safe in plodding traffic?

Imprisoned in a crystal desert, an elderly man watches
the storm sifting like hourglass sand.  A neighbor bends
to a shovel at the hardened pile left by plows,
his wife worried she’ll be widowed.

Houses shudder as a rumbling diesel pushes curls of snow.
Doped on coffee, besotted with white gold, the driver red-
eyed and exhausted imagines barroom boasts on a check fat
with overtime.

Professional television smiles sell the storm like the latest
diet to a market of worry and dreams.  Cartoonish radar
colors track a fast-moving nor’easter whose ten to twelve
inches turns the day inside out. 
 
 

Off the Hook

Kicking and screaming, I’ve made a big down payment on my dues as a member of the 21st century.  At long last I have a cell phone, though with the umbilical-like security of the same number I’ve been reached at for over a quarter century.

Though I feel technologically virtuous having abandoned my landline, I can’t help but sense a little disloyalty toward my long-time home.  For the first time in about a hundred years, the house has no phone, no distinctive voice in the form of a ringtone.

Cell phones are as personal as wristwatches, their in-your-pocket convenience giving rise to a world where people respond from disparate places, but you know exactly who will pick up.  Landlines are part of buildings and are shared by whoever is nearby to grab the receiver.  They belong to an address more than individuals, and calls are to a place not a person.

The wireless future will change not just how we communicate, but the way in which we experience buildings.  It’s not unlike a world where watches eliminate the need for every clock now hanging on walls or blinking from a stove or electronic device.  Of course, with the time brightly lit on my cell phone, who needs a watch?

Romancing the Stones

Hartford Courant, January 10, 2010

We seem to have an inscrutable affection for stones, despite their cold and lifeless nature.  Call it the “Stonehenge syndrome,” but standing stones, cairns, and stacked rocks in the Japanese garden style are common in farmyards, on urban and suburban lawns, and near office buildings, apartments and shopping centers.

New England is renowned for both stony soils and stone walls threading through our forests and fields.  For generations, we’ve embraced this geologic abundance by standing long stones on end or building mounds to set property lines, mark trails, establish fence and hitching posts, and emblazon gateways.  But increasingly, property owners are using stones for less functional reasons.  More than ever, it seems that rocks either crudely shaped with tools or naturally formed are being used to make aesthetic, political or spiritual statements.

There’s a tall, rough-cut, gray standing stone at the entrance to the relatively new Wishing Well Apartments on busy Route 7 in New Milford.  On a steep, sleepy street in Collinsville, one of my neighbors has a massive stone about seven feet tall looming beside their driveway.   Another stone shaft can be found on the front lawn of a house on Hartford’s Warrenton Avenue.

Places in Time

Hartford Courant, January 3, 2010

 

Nothing of such importance goes so undetected by our senses as the passage of time.  The sun’s daily arc provides a rough calculation, but we typically see and keep time by clock faces and digital readouts.  Yet, while time is intangible, the progress of timekeeping is deeply embedded in Connecticut’s landscape.  It manifests itself in place names like Thomaston and Terryville, in old factories, in museums, and in a futuristic suburban building where the legacy still lives.

    Connecticut was home to the world’s first clock factory.  By 1809, Eli Terry was mass-producing an astounding 3,000 clocks a year in what is now the Terryville section of Plymouth, at a time when clocks were typically handcrafted at a rate of six to ten annually.  He did it by inventing water-powered machinery that made clock wheels and pinions and by the innovative use of interchangeable parts.  It was more than a revolution in production that reduced labor costs and lowered prices, making clocks affordable; Terry perfected machines that made other machines from identical machine-produced parts.  “It was,” as writer Diana Muir observed, “an idea that would change the world.”