David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

January Thaw

Weeks of determined walking, muscles arched against icy
gusts, have dissolved in an overnight wash of softened air.
Cold crawls up my leg from the still starched ground, but I’ve
slowed, lavishing time on robins hopping amid
a gauntlet of snow patches.

I’m loose jointed, giddy with rushing blood.  No longer
imprisoned by frost, the planet slackens with rotting leaf scents
and the tick-tock of water sliding from roofs toward gurgling
storm drains.  Corners of every mouth thaw, smiles
semaphore what words might renounce.

We want to believe.  But before long the ground will tighten
like a healing scar, we’ll soon again hunker deep in our coats.
Knowing winter’s return is as inevitable as broken
engagements and bounced checks, we horde these hours
like coins to spend in our own seasons of confounding hope.

Hunting for Doors

We use them every day, but they’re so familiar as to be hardly seen.  Fabricated for very practical  purposes, doorways are a necessary part of any building.  But in their design and construction they  convey messages that go well beyond the simplicity of their workaday purpose.  So on a whim last week I walked around my neighborhood to see what I could learn by some careful and conscious looking at doors.

Night Walk (poem)

Night is a well-worn coat I slip into,
wooly-plush and thick.  There’s a viscosity and weight
to the dark which feels as if it could be grasped and held.
It seems to stretch and absorb shock like a black
bolt of lycra fabric.  Animal-eyed stars peer coldly,
and shadows multiply in moonlight, sharpened or faded
with lunar phases, but always leaving the distance
between the object and opaque indistinct.

With irises starved for illumination smells and sounds
prolong and elongate, swell and bloat.  I breathe lilac
scent from blocks away and car exhaust lingers long
after the vehicle departs.  Owl-hoot from deep woods
comes to me as clearly as a phone call and low
conversation from a down-street porch is whispered
just to me.  Uncertainty haunts every footstep testing texture
and slope, fingering gravel, pavement and grass like Braille.

Untethered to distinct sunlit surfaces, imagination wanders
with questions daylight so feebly answers.  The reflux
of dreams, last-chances, joys and shame arise like outcast
ghosts.  Fearing my own deeper darkness I navigate by dead
reckoning, relying on where I’ve been to know where I’m
going.  Splashing into hidden puddles of memory, I’m
forever cowering beneath blankets during Dad’s drunken
rants, dropping a ball to schoolyard taunts, cutting my son’s
umbilical, squeezed by the desperate gravity of divorce,
breathing a mountain peak’s panoramic revelation.

My body’s diminished by dark, absorbed into a shadowy
landscape of rocks, trees, roads and structures
where thoughts ferment, darting dimly across expectations
like a deer leaping into headlights on an unlit road.
There’s nothing dismal or dreary in darkness, no gloom
or melancholy, only a self left stranded without the eyes’
acute surveillance.  In a sudden adrenalin charge
I find incandescence and discovery, for night
is not just a later hour or light’s absence, but a disguise
revealing what cannot be seen by day.

Bringing the Outside Indoors

I enjoy spending time outside.  So it’s no surprise that I like bringing the outdoors inside.  And the best way to do so is with a few carefully selected objects accidentally found along roads, on out-of-the-way trails, at riverbanks and tidal wrack lines, or while bushwhacking over ledges and through thickets.  Such odds and ends typically have little value except to the finder for whom they are infused the joy of discovery, the memory of adventure, and the intimacy of having had something in hand.  I display these small wonders on shelves, mantles, tables and almost any flat surface I can find at home.