David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Spring Love on Lamentation (New England Trail Haibun)

Silver Lake shines below like a polished platter, but the couple wrapped around each other are not looking. Faces pressed together, they’re unaware that I’m gazing north to Hartford’s huddled towers and the distant bluish humps of Mounts Tom and Holyoke. Loudly clearing my throat, I turn toward the Hanging Hills leaning shoulder to shoulder.

Awkwardly getting up to greet me is a lean boy with a Mohawk haircut, lip ring, and sweetly mischievous look, and a leggy ponytailed blonde with her blouse open more than her mother would like. They flash quick smiles. He picks up the tightly rolled sleeping bag that lies between them, and they head down the trail looking for a soft bed of unfurling ferns or a drift of last year’s fallen chestnut oak leaves.

Momentarily I lose the view, falling far into my teen memories. Then, I think about the clusters of nodding trout lilies and pinkish hepatica along the trail, the birds singing for a mate and the bears and deer born in these young months of the year. Recalling that the mountain is named for a seventeenth-century tale of a man lost three days on this ridge and terrorized by visions of dragons, serpents, and howling beasts, I imagine the youngsters in the woods, losing themselves for just a few ecstatic moments.

birdsong and blossoms
lament only lost chances
short seasons for love

(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/

Requiem for a Tree, Hope for a Neighborhood

It’s been gone a couple years, but I still miss Hartford’s High Street Elm. Once clearly visible from I-84, my mind still sees it every time I pass through the city. Perhaps, its a phenomenon somewhat akin to phantom limb syndrome. Despite disfigurement by storms and neglect, it was a tree of uncommon elegance rising about 80 feet above the surrounding pavement with a canopy spread of 95 feet and a trunk circumference of over 15 feet. Tree huggers needed friends to get their arms around it.

“I loved that tree,” Hartford City Forester Heather Dionne told me. “It was unique. It was so sad that it had to come down.” The elm had lost some huge limbs to Storm Alfred, the 2011 nor’easter that brought heavy snow at Halloween. Afterward, she had the tree pruned and mulched. Within a couple years, another storm knocked off a substantial limb. The tree began to die. Examining the stump, Dionne estimated a lifespan of 137 years.

Higby's Sky Pasture (New England Trail Haibun)

Sandwiched between the escarpment and thick woods is a broad grassy meadow dotted with stunted oak, ash, and hickory. Sunlight filters through a thin canopy and pools in the unkempt sedges. Studded with boulders, islands of scraggly cedar, and wizened silver-bleached trees that fell long ago, I feel I’ve stumbled into a lost fairytale world.

Gazing across the soft, verdant glade to the rockbound cliffs, there’s nothing but sky and air to a far horizon. I’m giddy, as if floating on this carpet of shaggy grass, a realm of awakened dreams, of holographic imagination. An electric radiance grips me. But the trail beckons to my feet and I obey, unknowingly taking something with me.

grass glades, stunted trees
a lowland fragment stranded
thrust into the sky

(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/