David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

The Breach: Grating the Nutmeg Podcast

Explore my novel in verse, The Breach: Voices Haunting a New England Mill Town with the host of the Grating the Nutmeg podcast, Connecticut State Historian Walter Woodward.   History meets poetry in this relaxed and sometimes poignant conversation about how the past is present in fictionalized stories.  Enjoy listening to a few of the poems being read.  Listen

The Breach: Voices Haunting a New England Mill Town

Imagine walls could actually talk as a New England factory community faces closure of its signature mill due to environmental contamination and foreign competition.  This story of politics, family life, competing redevelopment schemes, gossiping locals, and a mother fiercely protecting her children is told in the voice of common objects—from the church steeple clock to a Bridgeport milling machine to an umbrella.  They witness a bit of drinking, sex, a suicide, and the hopes and dreams of the human beings around them.  How did these everyday things find their voice?  Readers may never again look at the ordinary objects around them the same.

SILVER MEDAL winner for BEST NORTHEAST REGIONAL FICTION from the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY), GRAND PRIZE SHORT LIST and HONORABLE MENTION for POETRY from the Eric Hoffer Book Award

 

Texture of Silence (poem)

A lichen patched boulder is the texture
of silence I long to emulate. I want to melt
into the landscape, forget the surveyor
and yield to the survey like oaks and pines,
sparkling schist and red sandstone.

I yearn to be camouflaged, an unseen
sensation like wind on my cheek, or the stream
chattering in my ear. Distilled to an essence,
I’d find a place where prayers expand
forever, like the invisible gases I breathe.

Signs of Haunting

I’m haunted by ghosts very easily seen in daylight. Neither cinematic ectoplasms nor spirits from beyond, they are created of pigment on brick, hardened apparitions you can’t put a fist through. Like conventional phantoms they convey messages from the past, but there’s nothing supernatural about ghost signs. Perhaps, what most makes them ghostly is that while visible to all, they are seen by few.

A ghost sign is a weathered, hand-painted outdoor advertisement, usually found on the brick walls of buildings in urban and small-town downtowns. Composed of lettering and illustrations, they may be faded almost to illegible, ghostly invisibility. Commercial images and voices of yesteryear, they often hawk services, wares, and companies that no longer exist, or beckon to us with nostalgic pitches for products that long ago slicked up their advertising. They persist in a netherworld of salutary neglect where structure owners don’t make the effort or spend the money to paint them over. “New” ones sometimes appear when a building is torn down revealing the illustrated wall of its neighbor.

I take ghost signs personally when walls are emblazoned with long lived and familiar products that I’ve used since childhood, like the one hawking Ivory soap for the long defunct Mareness grocery store in Lowville, New York. I feel time’s passage and long for just one more taste when I pass the ad in Northampton, Massachusetts for Uneeda Biscuits, a cracker no longer baked. Sometimes signs get a hasty revision such as the Pepsi sign in Danbury, Connecticut that has a price of ten cents and the promise of free samples crossed out.