David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Looking Up in New Haven: An Architectural Odyssey

Things were looking up in New Haven not long ago, or at least I was doing so.  I spent several hours wandering the downtown streets with the decided intention of gazing at the tops of buildings just for  the pleasure of it.  In a kind of windowless window shopping I wasn’t out to buy anything and walked away with nothing but photos.  I had no purpose but a kind of vagabond looking.

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.

Secret Lives of Books

Ever wonder where your books have been without your knowing or remembering?  It’s not like they sneak out at night or have their own animated existences like Buzz Lightyear and the other playthings in Toy Story, but books, especially used ones, have a history, not just as literary works or pieces of an author’s life, but as individual objects.  Sure, Emily Dickinson wrote “There is no Frigate like a book/To take us Lands away,” but sometimes the ship sails without us.

Rocks for the Ages: Nature, Culture and Glacial Boulders

I recently hiked the blue-blazed Nipmuck Trail to Mansfield’s Wolf Rock, an enormous, roughly egg-shaped boulder that seems to sit precariously at the top of a forty-footcliff.  From this vantage I peered into the wooded Sawmill Brook Valley and at a few quilted squares of cultivated ground beyond which were low ridges faded blue-gray.  But while the view was spectacular, something about the Sisyphean stone was mesmerizing.  Positioned on the highest point around, it seemed out of place even as it defined the place.