David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Tasting is Believing: World's Best Carrots

Brilliant orange, juicy, honey sweet and with a satisfying crispy crunch that puts cucumbers and potato chips to shame, I’ve found the world’s best carrots.  Neither imported from an exotic locale nor bearing a fancy pedigree, they’re produced in classic loamy and stony New England soil on sloping ground little more than two miles from my home.

With Billy Collins (poem)

With you in my pocket as July simmered into August, I
took careful bites of that astonishing apple plucked from
Eden’s tree.  I never knew when a moment might permit
a poem, like a parent granting an extra few minutes of play.

I stood in line with a cartful of groceries as you turned
black umbrellas into rare mushrooms.  Boys played steal
the bacon at Scout camp when your past contracted
into the rearview mirror.  You walked across the Atlantic
while I glanced at a pendulous blonde wearing
a blouse the color of fresh fruit.

You might blush knowing I took you to bed, falling asleep
with your pages like soft skin.  In the morning we lingered
on the porcelain throne as I mouthed a few more
caffeinated lines before yesterday swirled away.  Breakfast
became memorable when a splat of jam bled on page
40 as you put down the cat.

Our time together seemed always inapt, out of step
and out of tune.  Accidental meanings grew in stanzas
like random seeds tossed to a blustery wind. Not even
a poet could imagine the places we took each other.

Read to Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States, during a dinner in his honor on August 7, 2013 at the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, Connecticut.

 

Stories and Stone: The Forlorn Civil War Soldier

        There is a crack in everything God has made.
                —Ralph Waldo Emerson

An artistic and historical jewel, one of the most significant hidden-in-plain-sight objects I’ve ever  encountered has disappeared—but only temporarily.  Over eight feet tall and stationed beside a heavily  trafficked Hartford road near a busy I-91 off-ramp, the dilapidated Forlorn Soldier carved of brownstone was passed unnoticed by thousands each day for decades.  Following insertion of metal rods and injections of epoxy, a recent hot July day found him braced with lumber, wrapped like hamburger in plastic and foam, and hoisted by crane onto a flatbed for transport to a statuary “field hospital” for cleaning and stabilization.