David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Frog Run (poem)

Choruses of peepers sing an endless
ringing chirp from a half frozen swamp
beyond the sugarbush. I harvest

the last run before the sap goes sour.
For six weeks I’m a divining rod
of fickle weather, both groundhog

and shadow, the lifeblood of maples
circulating within me. Now I’m bone-sore
from a long season, pushing myself

in deep zombied exhaustion.
Thousands of gallons were hauled from
trees to sugarhouse, but only to drive

most of it off in frenzied boils, churning
with foam and large cauliflowered
bubbles conjuring a Zen-like haze

where less becomes so much more.
Sweet steam is my heaven-bound incense,
the shack sauna-like with moisture

and warmth, welcoming friends
out of freezing winds and early dark.
We chat away hours, the heart’s

endearing trivialities opening without
warning since boiling is made
of time and listening. Clear liquid

slowly thickens to golden, an alchemy
of concentrated sunshine
ripening the sugarmaker into spring.

Found Ferlinghetti at 100: A Birthday Souvenir (poem)

You were a pocket poet in my backpack
at sixteen as I thumbed coast-to-coast
to find the secret meaning of things,
daring to cross all the obscene boundaries.

Suffering many unfair arguments
with existence, for years afterward
I struggled for an open eye, open heart.

Decades passed before I knew how to paint
sunlight, find a Buddha in the woodpile
and keep a journal for the protection of all beings.

My Brooklyn-bred dad died in a Coney
Island of the mind, teasing me with rhythmic
sea sounds and a scent of fries and salt,
mere pictures of the gone world.

I learned that growing older births
landscapes of living and dying that steal
my time and take a bit of world from me.

So I found that these are my rivers
—Farmington to Connecticut to sea—
and discovered poetry as an insurgent art.

It took too long to know that love
is no stone on the moon, but the wet, soft,
warmth of my lover’s kiss, and the open
road of your poems that led me there.

Death of a Cemetery?

Can ghosts kill a cemetery? As final resting places for the dead, graveyards are natural hosts to ghost stories. Many are said to be associated with restless spirits, and fun Halloween lantern tours stirring imaginations with creepy and macabre tales are increasingly popular. But believe in ghosts or not, simple stories of spectral phantoms have the power to do actual damage to hallowed ground.

Located on a lonely stretch of dirt road, a friend and I recently visited Burlington, Connecticut’s Seventh Day Baptist Cemetery. About half an acre surrounded by a low tumbledown stone wall, it’s perched on uneven, sloping ground in a forested area. A beautiful spot, it would be perfect for picnics if not already devoted to the dead. It’s not unlike other small rural cemeteries in New England except for one thing: none of its almost thirty monuments is standing. Only the broken top of a marble slab lying flat on the ground remains. All that’s left of the others are broken off stubs or footings. The missing and vandalized gravestones have fallen victim to the ghostly Green Lady, or at least to her legend.

Skunk Cabbage (New England Trail Haibun)

Descending Beseck ridge on a cold March day, I come to the intersection of a woods road and small stream with muddy margins thick with skunk cabbage. There are low spots in high places. Leathery hood-like spathes, cupped like a pair of hands, protect fragile flowerbuds generating heat as they expand. They’ve pushed their way through the half frozen muck, rising among snow patches and last year’s leaf litter. Mottled and patterned in unpredictable swirls and stripes of purple and green, their irregular coloring can induce hypnosis in this gray and brown season.

Growing in soil the consistency of gumbo with large, offensive smelling leaves emerging in a few weeks, this brave plant is neither skunk nor cabbage, but its color and scent invites flies and other pollinators. Long before the equinox, it’s testing the soil’s warmth, the sun’s strength. I glimpse not just fleeting beauty, but a medicine that this earliest and surest sign of spring has for a winter weary soul.

off-putting skunk smell
fleshy spathes a welcome sight
springtime in winter

 

(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.  To travel the entire New England Trail with 90 haibun go to https://www.ctwoodlands.org/blue-blazed-hiking-trails/half-million-footsteps-journey-through-poetry-the-new-england-trail)

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/