David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Nest Finding Season

As much as I delight in the party pastels and ongoing kaleidoscopic color changes of autumn leaves, I’m also somewhat relieved when the distraction is over.  As Thanksgiving approaches in mid November I  feel gratitude for bare branches.  The leaves fall and a curtain rises on the landscape.  Where a month ago the view was all but obscured and visually impenetrable with foliage, now houses, bony ledges, old mill dams, streams and other elements of the countryside can be clearly seen and are outlined in the thin, slanted light of the season.

Among the most intriguing things revealed by naked branches are birds’ nests.  Largely invisible since their creation in spring, tens of them can be seen on even a short walk, whether deep in the woods, along a roadside, or in the neighborhood vacant lot.  Dark clumps of sticks, mud, leaves and other readily available materials are lodged in the crotches of trees, high in their crowns, on low hanging branches and in the tangled stems of shrubs.

Junk (Poem)

Pistons frozen, blocks rusted, pulleys and fan belts
corroded, machine corpses glow a soft, leathery orange.
Once enslaved splitting wood, baling hay, mowing lawns,
and turning soil, they stand stiff and still behind barns,
at stonewalled field edges and trapped in deep woods
where carburetors gasped their last air and fuel.  Fossilized
carcasses of enterprise, they snorted and thundered
baring fierce teeth, augers, rake-bars, tines, and discs
in a distant motor-driven Jurassic.

Tousled grass hides them, trees push their way through
rotting frames and the wheels of progress.  Steel cylinders,
shafts, cowling and pipes meticulously fabricated in myriad
clever sizes, positions and shapes are colonized by
hawkweeds and asters, tangled in morning glories,
a launch pad for milkweed pods.  Slowly absorbed
by a world they once conquered, sculpted by weather
and time, something unwonted survives.

 

Byzantine Church or Stonemason Doodling?

Towering trees with spreading crowns combined with a hushed sylvan quiet sometimes makes stepping  into the woods feel like entering a cathedral.  Perhaps just such an experience contributes to a belief by  some people that within Connecticut’s Cockaponset State Forest in Guilford is a 5th century Byzantine Church, the oldest Christian house of worship in North America.  But don’t expect ruined walls, belfry remains or pews.  It’s more of an outdoor chapel, a space in the woods with interesting carving in the bedrock that most people wouldn’t notice unless they were looking for it.

The Joy of Ruins

A curving stone stairway supported on three arches leads to a place that no longer exists, stops in mid air leaving even a careful climber with a moment of vertigo.  Nearby, broad steps lead to a low stone   wall punctuated by columns outlining the footprint of a building long gone.  The wreck of a fireplace, once the center of domestic cheer, presides glumly over the ruin.  At the back edge of the spalling concrete platform, arches in the stone foundation access a basement where a few beer cans, pieces of clothing and fast food wrappers evidence a site of teenage revels.   Now surrounded by thick woods of maple, pine and birch, the wrecked structure is a deteriorating monument to a past life, an incubator of stories.  But you’d be hard pressed to concoct a better tale than the truth to which these remains are a monument.