David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Sleeping Giant (poem)

a traprock ridge near home

You were invisible as I watched my step
on tricky traprock, climbing along narrow
ravines thick with oak and beech, breathing hard
as I reached the ridge. Dazzled by the view
of valley, city, and salt water from your cliff-edge
chin and high hip, the notion of chest, arms
and legs seemed an extravagance,
a figment of metaphor. Turkey vultures
circled on thermals searching for delicious
death, but their graceful flight was all I knew.

Driving north from New Haven one afternoon,
I saw you, three miles from head to foot,
lying on your back and fast asleep, the clear
outline of your body exposing my Lilliputian
myopia, the failed reality of our relationship
when the trails brought me close among the hemlocks
and hardwoods, and along the jagged windswept
ledges where I imagined I knew you.

I now walk quietly, knowing that the spirit
Kiehtan drowsed you into deep, stony sleep for rowdy
behavior moving rivers, causing floods,
and gorging yourself on the people’s oysters.
In this moment of soft spring air
it’s as believable as the violent upwelling of molten
earth two hundred million years ago
and then tedious eons of cooling and erosion.
You’ve shown me there is more
than one way of looking, that one size never fits all.

A century ago, quarrymen exploded your head,
crushed the indomitable stone and carted it away
to build the roads which bring me easily
into your colossal presence. My heart knows
they stopped for fear their blasting would awaken
you in anger to uproot trees and rip up soil,
again altering the course of waters with the whole
country trembling at your laborious rise.

I unwind and slowly climb the muscular, angular,
slope of your slumbering body. I feel your pine
scented breath as I breathe. Your human shape
has kept these woods, left you protector
of pileated woodpeckers, salamanders, wood frogs,
Christmas fern, foxes, deer, and flowers
from bloodroot in March to September’s asters.
Rest well, snooze away as awe and wonder awaken
a hiker’s ordinary days and keep you alive
in a landscape created in our own image.

Celebrating the Sun at Solstice

Remember the summer of 2017’s solar eclipse? On this day when we’ll enjoy the year’s least amount of light here in Collinsville, Connecticut—nine hours, eight minutes, and thirty-five seconds—it seems absurd, perverse even, to have celebrated the sun’s disappearance in mid afternoon, even for a just few moments. Winter begins tomorrow. I long to feel the sun’s warmth, to have it greet me on awakening, and to watch it languidly linger in the evening with a gaudy glow.

It’s hard now to imagine how profligately we spent August’s ripening warmth and lavish sunshine, as if summer were endless. Eclipse mania seemed to grip the country. For weeks the media heralded the sun’s brief retreat with scientific explanations, retellings of historic occurrences, and interviews with people traveling for the event or in the path of totality. Viewing glasses sold briskly and could not be had for love or money more than a week before the celestial show. Few were the conversations without eclipse talk.

Porcupine (poem)

I don’t expect letters from the woods
despite a quiver’s-worth of quills.
Barbs launched like a river of arrows
assaulting a castle is just a fake
news story that won’t die.

Needing neither agility nor speed,
but bristling like a pincushion
when threatened, has left
the passive-aggressive porcupine
happily slow-witted and sluggish.

Craving salt as if it were cash,
I’ve seen them chew a hiker’s idle
sweat-soaked boots or socks to shards
and gnaw a car’s undercarriage
until the hoses are shredded.

I sometimes find piles of clipped
twigs and scat beneath tall hemlocks
or pine. Far above, a dark creature
with yellow tipped spines is fast
asleep or chomping tree bark.

Accomplished social climbers,
secretive porcupines lurk in high places.
Reluctant to provoke, I shun
their prickly ways,
avoiding a launch of barbed words.

Photo courtesy of Gerri Griswold

 

Half a Million Footsteps: Deep Traveling the New England Trail

The New England Trail (NET) runs 215 miles from Guilford, Connecticut to the Massachusetts/New Hampshire Border, and is one of eleven national scenic  trails in the United States. The NET was designated on March 30, 2009. The NET travels through classic New England landscape features and historic landmarks.

CFPA's Artist-in-Residence, David K. Leff, served as Poet-in-Residence from Fall of 2016 to the Fall of 2017. Throughout his appointment, David hiked sections of the NET and wrote poetry inspired by his walks along the trail. He has written his poems in the style of Haibun, described as a marriage of prose and Haiku. Leff noted "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." 

To hike the New England Trail with David, start Here