David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

The Timeless Power of Public Clocks

Public clocks are making a comeback.  You’d think that timepieces along streets and on buildings would be relics of the past in an age where wristwatches    are inexpensive, cell phones are common, and car dashboards have reliable clocks.  But rather than slowly fading monuments of the past, public clocks are proliferating.  And in a world that boasts of a “digital age” the surge in clocks is not with those that blink with colored numerals providing both time and temperature, but old fashioned timekeepers with faces and hands and often Roman numerals.

I have a particular affection for public clocks because I often rely on one.  Situated in the Greek revival pediment of the Congregational church at the end of my street, it’s visible from several windows of my house, including the one I look out of while working at my desk.  A simple circle of black Roman numerals with arrowhead hands, it stands out against the white building.  I’ve grown so used to the convenience of looking out to see the time that during the few occasions when the mechanism has been on the fritz, I’ve felt a vague discomfort that’s only relieved when the clock resumes it horological duties.

Death on Higby (New England Trail Haibun)

I’m on the hunt for a forgotten tragedy within a stone’s throw of the trail. Up and down from Preston Notch toward Higby’s peak, the path taunts the cliff edge.  Views are muted and bluish in hazy humidity.  White and violet asters light the way like luminaries, their eye-like yellow button disks staring upward.

Just before the summit, I head off trail in a swale of mixed hardwoods punctuated with oases of hemlock.  Descending slightly, I pass a large traprock overhang forming the jagged maw of a cave.  Four deer, just downslope, spot me and dart into the woods.  Following a logging trace paved with grass and ferns, I come to a small plateau strewn with mechanical detritus—rusting pipes, gears, wires, springs, struts, and pieces of sheet metal, some of them melted.  On a rainy night at mid twentieth century, a silver Beechcraft sheared the tops of three oaks, crashed and burst into a fireball burning three people beyond recognition.

Perhaps the pilot saw Higby as a mere shadow, a dark cloud proving impenetrable.  No one is buried here, but a graveyard’s somber weight hangs like the muggy air.  I stand not amidst junk, but an accidental memorial.  Finding this wayward, broken work of man feels strangely disorienting.  The plane rests in pieces among sticks, fallen leaves, acorns and brush, moldering like nature’s own debris.

broken metal bird
shards among ferns, beneath oaks
rust, acorns, leaves fall

(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 Language of Fences

You can’t go far without encountering a fence, yet they are so common we hardly see them.  Humble or elaborate, they blend in with buildings, roads, hillsides and trees.  Fences are among the most expressive features of our landscape, telegraphing messages and rendering visible an entire social order.

Fences are barriers, separations and enclosures.  They offer protection, establish a sense of limits and boundary, and provide a measure of possession that has both a psychological and physical impact.  Despite their ubiquity, we have long been conflicted about such structures.  “Good fences make good neighbors,” advises a character in Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall.”  But “don’t fence me in,” is the refrain of Cole Porter’s song of that name where the narrator “wants to ride thru the wide open country.”