David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Lichen Gardens (New England Trail Haibun)

Tattooing talus slopes of busted rock, ledges and boulders, tiny lichen’s marriage of algae and fungi survive extremes nothing else dares. Ashen green and ancient, they appear in flattened splotches and bearded mounds of branching threads. A tapestry of patterns, textures and subtle color, they grow with the detailed delicacy of a pen-and-ink drawing. Noticing their crinkly edges and foamy tufts quickens my eye for all else.

A topography of lichens shaped by patient centuries of growth colonizes and encrusts unyielding stone, slowly gnawing away at these very bones of the planet, leaving soil in their wake. Brightening at a hint of moist fog, snow or rain, shriveling in wind, they whisper stories about the world around them.

The trail moves through gardens of lichen camouflaged by their ubiquity. It takes as much effort to see them as it does to scale the heights. Crunchy underfoot, one step can erase hundreds of years and leave bare spots lasting decades.

slowly eating rocks
thriving in hostile terrain
boots scrape off eons

(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/

Talus Slope (New England Trail Haibun)

Between East and west Peak each footfall is a thought. Leapfrogging from rock to rock, the steep slope leaves one leg shorter than the other. It’s a barren, otherworldly zone of jagged lichen scabbed stones, a desert of interlocking blocks where little grows. This drear, naked jumble lying like a piece of abstract land-art was judged mean and valueless by colonials. It’s still an eerie slice of primeval.

In this strange, topsy-turvy mystery place, winter ice survives deep among crevices and cavities, caressing my legs with cold drafts in July. January brings the mists of moist summer breath from among the stones as if a creature exhaled from below. Surrounding rocks wear collars of lacy rime.

In warmer weather, snakes sunbathe and slither among the helter-skelter puzzle of broken basalt and flaunt their footless advantage. Black racer, rat snake, or gilt striped garter, they glide effortlessly without legs. The trail isn’t always easy for walkers.

garden of sharp rocks
breaking a wayfarers rhythm
dance among the stones

(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/

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/

City of Cairns (New England Trail Haibun)

Along the wooded backbone of Penwood Park, just before descending to Lake Louise, are a couple dozen cairns gathered on a low rocky rise. Surrounded by mountain laurel, chestnut oak and pine, the stacks of angular traprock chunks are pillar-like, triangular, pyramidal, in thin spires, and laid horizontally. Some are fitted among tree limbs. Abstract sculpture or small stone city, they beckon to the imagination.

Constructing memories, passersby leave a presence connecting the hand, eye, and spirit to the land’s lasting reality. Is it a monument, waymark, or memorial? What primal instinct moves us to leave bits of ourselves tucked among the ancient pieces of basalt? I find a letter to a lost brother, the photo of a favorite dog, rosary beads, a tiny bamboo cross, and a note too faded to read.

braille read in piled rocks
mailbox to eternity
hands love holding stones

(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/

Beaver Empire (New England Trail Haibun)

A faded logging trace on an easy grade leads through a forest of oak and pine on the way to Shutesbury’s Town Farm Road. Suddenly my eye is drawn to light on one side of the trail. Through the trees I spot a long, linear swamp. I walk down to it through open woods dotted with pointed stumps, felled trees, and half chewed trunks of oak and black birch oozing sap. As I approach the ground softens, becomes mucky and begins to give way. I’m awestruck by an eight-foot high dam of tangled, sun-silvered sticks arcing across the head of a large impoundment.

Cupped by low hills thick with white pine are a series of dams, each one longer and taller than the next, the pools behind them higher and stretching further than the one below. The oldest downstream structures are leaky, half collapsed and overgrown, partially hidden in cattails, sediment, and sedgy tussocks. In the top pond is a large conical lodge of mud-plastered sticks topped with a tall, slender dead tree looking like a flagpole.

I listen to the trilled peeping of tree frogs, watch a sharp-billed kingfisher dart across the water, and see a harrier on the hunt. With bleached standing deadwood and lush marshy edges, this purposefully designed, curated space is the wildest of places.

landscapes engineered
paradise for birds and frogs
new worlds created

(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/

Social Register Tree (New England Trail Haibun)

Just below the massive ledges of Mt. Norwottock’s Horse Caves, the forest suddenly goes from oak to beech. Almost immediately, the trail passes a large specimen tattooed with graffiti carved in its smooth, smoke gray bark. Like an Egyptian obelisk busy with hieroglyphs, the columnar trunk is filled with initials, numerals, geometrics, and even a smiley face. Passers by know that Leo, Satch, John and many others were here. Some have left only cryptic initials like C.B, A.F., and D.T.. Encircled by cupid’s sign, I wondered if R.G. + D.S. or Desi + Jay were still an item, or whether these hearts have been broken. Some incisions look as if they were made yesterday, others are weathered, grown swollen and distorted as the tree got larger and healed.

What is it about beech trunks that present a blank page urging people to find a sharp tool and leave their mark? Common in cemeteries, along streets, and in urban parks, such inscrutable histories seem odd where people profess to get away from what they left behind. In an age where words and symbols can go instantly around the globe and seemingly last forever, what is it about chiseling into the flesh of a tree that heightens messages? Is it vandalism or my own voyeuristic curiosity that annoys me most?

silent messengers
names and dates carved in beech bark
readers never known

(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/

Hiker's Orchid (New England Trail Haibun)

Glowing on Beseck ridge like rosy lantern mantles in oak and pine shadows, lady slippers are no hiking boots. But the delicate, purple veined pink pouch above a pair of oval ribbed leaves stops the most determined lug-soled trampers in their tracks. Growing singly or in clumps, these ethereal blooms seem too beautiful, too frail to be real. They never fail to lift my heart.

With a puffed-out petal appearing like the toe of a shoe, they’re called moccasin flower after the footwear of Natives, and squirrel sneakers for growing where the bushytailed creatures antically collect acorns. But they’d be too soft and silky for hiking, even if they came in my size. Despite their seeming fragility, these orchids grow along woods roads and in patches of humus on mountain slopes enduring the cold, wind, and rain that keeps me and my boots indoors. These shoes won’t walk, but stand their ground.

no shoe for hikers
too small and dainty for trails
perfect fit for eyes

(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/

 

Nike on High (New England Trail Haibun)

High on an escarpment just south of Pinnacle Rock, in a place seemingly without boundaries, I find a long stretch of rusted and vine tangled chain link fence topped with barbed wire. A network of macadam paths cracked by tree roots and obscured with leaf litter lead to a cluster of concrete pads where buildings once sat. Chunks of broken masonry, corroded pieces of pipe and angle iron, and other metal fragments are scattered among the leaves.

During the Cold War, Nike was here and watching, always watching and ready for Soviet bombers. In low cement block buildings young soldiers, their faces radiant with the glow of radar screens, scanned the sky around the clock. Hunkered down in bunkers, wired on coffee, they waited patiently for the moment when the inevitable would meet the unavoidable. Just below the cliff were hidden magazines where an order from above would launch warhead-loaded missiles whose explosions could sound the beginning of the end.

High military security has surrendered to the oaks and tangles of brush. Given time, nature swallows our abandoned hopes and fears. The trail jogs memory with a few accidental monuments for those who are watching, carefully watching. Even the space-age leaves ghosts.

eve of destruction
fearsome missiles shaped by fear
nature heals the scar

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(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/