David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

What's on the Lawn? Homespun Yard Sculptures

I keep my eyes peeled for them whenever I’m behind the wheel or walking along a street.  They never fail to elicit a smile, or cause me to pause with a     mind-bending thought.  Poised somewhere between high art and the kitsch of mass produced lawn ornaments, homemade yard sculptures are a delight of travel.  They may be in the form of a common object like an airplane or a human figure.  Some are abstract.  Fabricated of metal, wood, plastic and other substances, they can be made of new, recycled or natural materials.

Yard sculptures often have universal resonance, whether they recall the monolithic statues of Easter Island, or childhood memories elicited by a giant paper airplane caught in a tree.  Sometimes they have meanings known only to locals, like the large candy-striped letter “Z” that sits atop a tall tree stump beside a home on a Hadley, Massachusetts back road.  Such objects, expressing the enthusiasms of the people who created them, exhibit whimsy and playfulness, and help relieve us of common expectations in our familiar countryside.

Typically on a front lawn, but sometimes elevated in a tree or alongside a house, yard sculptures are distinct statements by a property’s inhabitants.  While creativity can flourish even within the rigid conventions of lawns, flowers, and foundation plants fronting a house, this kind of homespun folk art grabs attention like no ornamental planting.  They add interest to an otherwise mundane drive or ordinary landscape.

Selectmen's Stones (New England Trail Haibun)

From Cream Pot Road the path winds through thick woods until ascending steeply to the Mica Ledges.  Flecks of glassy crystals embedded in the gray, west slanted schist are a galaxy of sparkles in late afternoon sun.  The exposed slab is dotted with windswept, contorted pitch pines that found a crack or island of shallow soil to take root.  The weather sculpted trees seem to have frozen while dancing.  I look out toward long wooded ridges running south to north.  Below me is a suburbanizing hillside pasture.  A farm is lodged in the valley’s throat.

Just south of the ledges is a low, irregular heap of rocks atop a mossy knoll.  Several are inscribed with crudely incised initials and dates, the earliest from the late nineteenth century, the most recent from the twenty-first.  These Selectmen’s Stones define the corner boundary of Durham, Madison and Guilford.  Deposited by elected officials over centuries from the days when laws commanded they periodically perambulate town bounds, the stones stir curiosity in an age of aerial photography and global positioning.

I stand in three towns at once with only a cluster of oaks, a chickadee, and a chirring squirrel as witnesses.   Was a time, when being in a place and of a place was as true and substantial as stones.

stones marking time, space
bypast cairn growing lichen
boundaries piled high

(Haibun is a marriage of prose and haiku.  It was first practiced by seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho who perfected the form in a journal he kept on a trip to the remote regions of northern Japan. Gary Snyder, James Merrill, and Jack Kerouac are among American interpreters of the genre.  Haibun best expresses the spirit of the New England Trail because it combines clear-eyed prose descriptions of people, objects and places along with poetry that awakens the imagination.)

The New England National Scenic Trail, a unit of the National Park Service, runs 215 miles from Guilford, Connecticut to the Massachusetts/ New Hampshire border.  The trail is maintained by volunteers of the Connecticut Forest & Park Association in Connecticut and the Appalachian Mountain Club in Massachusetts.  For more go to https://newenglandtrail.org/

Immortal Poet (New England Trail Haibun)

From Guilford’s Boston Street I dart through the stone pillars of Alder Brook Cemetery.  In this thickly settled sculpture garden of the gone, Fitz-Greene Halleck, only poet forever on the trail, has slept since 1867.   Standing beside his granite obelisk, I give voice to his poem “Connecticut,” describing “this rough land of earth, stone and tree.” Clearly he belongs to this path.

Once as well known as Longfellow, he was called an American Byron.  Immortalized in New York’s Central Park with the first statue celebrating an American poet, he sits there eternally atop a stone pedestal grasping a book and gazing into the distance.  President Hayes unveiled him in 1877 before a crowd of thousands.

Today his name is all but unknown, even to poets.  His work is rarely heard.  “One of the few, the immortal names that were not born to die,” I read on his stone, and hold my breath.

Paper or carved stone
stanzas hunger for readers
words are quickly buried.

(Haibun is a marriage of prose and haiku.  It was first practiced by seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho who perfected the form in a journal he kept on a trip to the remote regions of northern Japan. Gary Snyder, James Merrill, and Jack Kerouac are among American interpreters of the genre.  Haibun best expresses the spirit of the New England Trail because it combines clear-eyed prose descriptions of people, objects and places along with poetry that awakens the imagination.)

The New England National Scenic Trail, a unit of the National Park Service, runs 215 miles from Guilford, Connecticut to the Massachusetts/ New Hampshire border.  The trail is maintained by volunteers of the Connecticut Forest & Park Association in Connecticut and the Appalachian Mountain Club in Massachusetts.  For more go to https://newenglandtrail.org/

The Future of Dinosaurs

The Future of Dinosaurs is Now
Dinosaurs have been extinct for millennia, but in Connecticut they refuse to die.  They are more popular than ever and not just in books, films and the psyches  of children.  The creatures are with us for science, art, education, entertainment and just plain kitsch.  You can’t travel far in this small state without running into a likeness or reference to these colossal reptiles.  Evidence that they once roamed here is all around us and lives in our imaginations. The future of dinosaurs is here and now.  Jurassic adventures are near at hand and not hard to find.