David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Beachcombing

Beachcombers are what they find, fragments of random
striving and longing, lookouts for the hit-or-miss gamble
of seeing something others have overlooked in a grab
bag scavenger hunt of waves and imagination.

Sooner or later the wrecks of all things arrive at the wrack
line, a chaos of pieces, an accidental archeology of stories
speaking to the scrounger picking at lobster and crab claws,
quahog shells, or a cormorant carcass alive with flies.

Children sculpt castles in stark, astringent light under
washed-out sky while greased bodies relax on blankets near
the death and desiccation of rotting seaweed, eye-gouged
fish and candy-colored buoys tangled with line.

But I long for orphaned objects caressed by a glance or light
kick.  I grasp what is broken, worn and bleached: whalebone
tree trunks, faded toys, a car fender, plastic bags, a coat, socks,
lumber from shattered boats or washed-away homes.

Tides are time, riven by heart-thumping surf beats in rhythm
with a private ocean of blood whose chemistry is seawater
lapping at a landscape as transitory and perishable
as a forager’s abandoned footprints on windblown sand.

I cannot endure the shore for long, yet I’m always there,
waiting like a gull or night-treading raccoon for the storm-
tossed lottery to wash up the next main chance, dreaming
myself Jonah spewed onto the beach, at last to tell my tale.

Coffee Making Art

There are probably as many ways to make coffee as there are drinkers of joe.   People are justly passionate about how their morning cup is made and I’m no different.  Despite all the fads from Mr. Coffee to the French press, I’ve stuck with the simple elegance of a Chemex for over thirty years despite relentless teasing and charges of fogyism from my children.

I’ve always defended my hourglass-shaped coffee maker of glass with its wooden collar and leather tie as the essence of practical beauty, of form married to function.  Until recently the kids were unimpressed, perhaps thinking the ideal coffee maker not only grinds beans and brews on a timer with an alarm clock, but pours it into a cup and then brushes their teeth afterward.  A new discovery, however, has led to a change of heart.

Living History in Root and Branch: Trees Matter

Trees matter in Connecticut.  One of the most densely settled states, it’s surprisingly also one of the   most heavily forested.  There are few places where so many people live so closely to so many trees.

Recent controversy over utility and transportation department roadside tree cutting should come as no surprise to those familiar with the Charter Oak, the muscularly limbed behemoth in which Connecticut’s charter was secreted to protect it from the king’s agents in 1687.  Though it fell in an 1856 summer gale, the grand tree’s image has graced everything from lottery tickets to political ads and even the state quarter.  Pieces of its wood are revered as talismans.  With a tree central to our political creation story, it’s no wonder that trees are valued here, perhaps more so than elsewhere.

Finding the Last Hungry Heart

Finding the Land Hungry Heart, Homebound Publications
2013 | 180 pages | Fiction| ISBN  978-1938846236 | Purchase | Kindle

Come to the confluence of the present and the 1960s.  Caleb Dempster, a disillusioned refugee from that turbulent era makes his living operating a municipal landfill, dealing with the waste of a society he’d once strived to change.  One night Dempster catches some teens climbing the landfill fence in the hope of spotting a bear that’s feeding on the garbage.  The kids’ interest in Dempster’s past, including a wild cross-country hitchhiking trip, enables him to see some value in experiences that had only tormented him with disappointment.  Following some hardball small town politics and violence, the kids enable Dempster to triumph by finding value in what he had thought was a wasted youth of unfulfilled promises.