David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Mt. Lincoln in December (New England Trail Haibun)

Leaving the paved road where a collapsed fieldstone foundation molders, I break trail on six inches of snow thawed and frozen, melted and refrozen.  My footsteps squeak and crunch.  High cirrus clouds filter sunlight sieved through pines before reaching the ground.  Deer tracks wind along and across the trail and around laurel thickets.  I pause to catch my breath and a blue jay’s harsh shriek shatters the quiet.

Gnarled, low growing oaks are thick near the summit.  Some bronzed, desiccated leaves still cling to their branches.  In a slight breeze they rustle with a dry, papery hiss.

The peak is busy with a cluster of structures.  A couple of low concrete block buildings squat beside a tall needle-like tower painted red and white, a fire tower, and a lower framework of skeletal steel.  Like thorns clinging to a wool coat, all are cluttered with communications antennas and transmitters—dishes and drums, shiny cylinders and tubular metal bent to a precise shape.  There must be an earful of chatter, music and data flowing around me.  But all I hear is a hairy woodpecker tapping an ersatz Morse code on a hollow oak limb, and the wind’s low whistle.  From Olympus to Sinai to Katahdin and beyond, messages have been sent from mountaintops.

Snarl of antennas
silent sounds pervade the air
I hear wind, birdsong

(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/

 

A Crypt Alive with Stories

Not what you would expect of a crypt.  It’s neither dark nor dank nor Halloween creepy.  Yet it’s a graveyard where visitors as well as residents are underground, though at different levels.  With sometimes peeling whitewashed walls and modern pendant lamps, it’s a rather clean, well-lighted place where not only the bodies, but the tombstones never see the sun.

Hidden on the New Haven Green beneath the federal style redbrick Center Church with its elaborate pediment and soaring spire, the Crypt is passed by thousands every day though known to few.  Although it is the final resting place for hundreds of unknown people whose burials are not marked, there are 137 gravestones dating from 1687 to 1812 below the church sanctuary.  Congregants literally pray over these sheltered dead at every service.

The Pinnacle (New England Trail Haibun)

My fiancée Mary and I climb an abandoned road in Penwood State Park, once the playground of twentieth century inventor Curtis Veeder.  The broken pavement with his clever mushroom-cap center drains is lined with the trail’s blue blazes as it passes traprock outcrops.  Bluets and geraniums bloom at the macadam’s edge where yellow cinquefoil threads through the grass.  Tiger swallowtails, mourning cloaks and American coppers float in sunlight like winged flowers.

At a flat, brushy area where Veeder’s cabin burned years ago, the trail narrows and climbs steeply to a lumpy basalt knob called The Pinnacle.   Beside a couple weather blasted cedars, Mary and I unpack a picnic of cheese, chocolate and wine.  Embedded in the rock nearby like a fat knitting needle poking the sky is one of Veeder’s eccentric survey pins.

Below us the Farmington River flashes with sunlight among fields, trees and swamp.  There’s a line of rooftops marking Simsbury’s main street, a white-spire church and brownstone town hall.  A rocky rollercoaster of forested ridges stretches north and south.

We eat slowly, savoring flavors and the view as Curtis and his fiancée Louise did when he proposed on this spot.  Possessed by resident spirits, we renew our promises to each other.   With a sweep of his hand, Curtis could have pointed to hundreds of acres that would be theirs together.  His gift of the park to all people allows me to do the same.

romance sweetly blooms
atop the high rocky knob
distant horizons

(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/