David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Time Made Visible

I saw time. It became almost palpable. I was wandering in a cemetery and spotted a tree that had swallowed three headstones. Jolted by an epiphany I don’t fully understand, I found something beautiful, and I can’t let go.

Cemeteries grow my time-sense. Neither clocks nor machines by which we can travel beyond the present, they are nevertheless places where the passage of years, decades, and centuries are manifest. Abounding in dates and ages which measure human life from infants to centenarians, they are also time capsules of culture in which typography, carving, sculpture, and epitaphs illustrate an evolution in the way communities engage the chronological limits of their world. They are rich with time-binding symbols like crosses, soul effigies, Masonic squares and compasses, and willow-and-urn designs that connect generations.

While consecrated to human corporeal mortality and spiritual eternity, other time scales appear in cemeteries from ephemeral flowers or snow in season, to long-lasting chunks and slabs of ancient geology in the form of inscribed monuments. But when exposed to water, frost, wind, and sun even the most durable materials erode. Sandstone flakes away, marble melts in acidic rainfall, and hard igneous granite weathers and fades.

Webster defines “time” as “a period during which something (as an action, process, or condition) exists or continues.” It’s an abstraction, an intangible phenomenon. It can be measured by celestial events or clocks from hourglasses to digital readouts. Although my life is largely regulated by time, it was nothing I truly visualized or could touch until I saw that tree.

It’s a large red maple with a lichen crusted colonial-era headstone partially buried within the trunk revealing only the left half of the inscription. On the tree’s other side, it has fully embraced the front of another gravestone so that the uninscribed back looks like an elfin-sized door fitted into the bark. A third headstone is caught among the roots, and appears to grow out of them.

I’d seen trees clutching tombstones before, but never three at once. Here was a collision of timescales—human, cultural, sylvan, and geologic. I don’t know how long the tree will continue growing around the stones, but eventually it will die. Once released from that woody grip, remnants of the sandstone will persist, but the carving inscribed in memory of the dead will likely be erased. Perhaps those names and dates are preserved in some church or government record on fragile paper or in ghostly digital form. Carving in stone may be the proverbial metaphor for permanence, but it doesn’t pass the test of time.

In a whirling, time-bending second, I found ordinary objects exposing a dizzying convergence of the instant and infinite. Time became something I could reach out and grab, at least for a moment.

Town Bridge (poem)

On restoration of an 1895 one-lane span in Canton, Connecticut

Entering a cat’s cradle of iron trusses
arcing high above the river,
connecting bank to bank,
I step on the brakes as the road
narrows to a one-lane blacktop.

Slowed to a walk,
I roll down windows, taste
the Farmington’s moist breath,
hear winging geese above, children
splashing in shallows below.

Framed by metal fretwork,
the slatey water threads among green
hills freckled with houses,
and I imagine thousands of eyes
savoring this view over three centuries.

On routine commutes to work,
errands to grocery or hardware,
on a ride to family and friends,
this enchanted geometry
spans both space and time.

Town Bridge is a rite of passage,
my each crossing a portal
to an elongated, elastic instant
that says home, a moment safekept
in the heart’s secret locket.

 

 

 

Cemetery as Road Map

Sometimes a cemetery reads like a road map. I often walk the aisles of New England’s ancient graveyards where brownstone, granite, slate and marble monuments are engraved with names as familiar to me as those of my neighbors. I might not know anyone called Hollister, Talcott, or Nye, but those monikers are frequently in mind. I see them all the time. They are emblazoned  on street signs. I drive on roads that remind me of these early colonial families, clues to a past that most people don’t even know exists.

I’d long had a notion of graveyard as gazetteer, but it hit me with particular force when visiting the Old Eastbury Burying Ground in Glastonbury, Connecticut. It’s a relatively small cemetery that until little more than two hundred years ago was associated with a church that stood across the street. It’s a simple country graveyard in a suburbanizing area, the stones skewed with centuries of frost and often splotched with gray-green lichen. There hasn’t been a burial since the Civil War era.

My wife Mary and I walked slowly on uneven ground of sparse grass and moss. We paid our respects to veterans of the Revolution, and were awed by the skill of long-ago carvers whose pinwheels, scrollwork and haunting profiled faces are a high art too little admired. But as we read epitaphs of long years and accomplishments, or lives tragically cut short, I felt an eerie acquaintance with the surnames engraved on the stones. An unease percolated in my mind, but Mary didn’t feel it. Then I realized that having once lived just a couple miles away, these names were as familiar as a commute to work, trip to the grocery, or drive to visit friends. I knew these names not as people, but as places, as roads that took me where I needed to go.

Old Eastbury has about a score more than 300 known graves. By my rough count, there are 58 different family names, a remarkable 23 of which are also local street names. These range from Griswold Street, which has a busy corner with a shopping center and chain drugstore, to Goodale Hill Road, part of which passes through a state forest. Wickham Road pours out onto a well trafficked state road in front of the sprawling modern high school. Hubbard Street hosts eighteenth century houses and the historical society. Risley Street runs in an area of modest homes on small lots, while Weir Street passes larger residences on wooded parcels.