David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Paintbrush and Rifle (poem)

Lowering binoculars, I look down
at my Audubon field guide and confirm
the sighting—a golden-crowned kinglet
high in a shaggy Norway spruce.
Gazing again through the lenses,
I imagine John James Audubon peering
along the site of his Long Tom rifle.

Silencing birds with bullets,
he made them immortal in luminous
brushstrokes, posing them so lifelike
with wires they seem to dance,
colors so vivid the images sing
loudly in whistles, trills, liquid
warbles, and harsh corvid cries.

Brand name for protecting birds,
mammals, reptiles and fish, swamps,
grasslands and mountainsides,
he taught us to see a wonderstruck
utility in beauty and forget the blood-
stained paints, the killing that saved,
enabling us to repent in his name.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Audubon, painted by John Syme, 1826

Birdsong (poem)

        Nearly one-third of the wild birds in the United States and Canada have vanished since 1970.
                                                Fitzpatrick & Marra, The New York Times, 9/19/2019

I awaken to ghost birds,
my ears ringing with dawn choruses past—
robins, finches, warblers, thrushes, and wrens
erupting in melodies so loud and full I could not think,
my mind carried on a freshet of sound.

This morning is no silent spring,
but a season muffled, slowly choked of breath,
a boisterous choir fading to an ensemble
of sweet chirps and whistles,
not the wall of sound I heard as a boy.

Connecting earth, air and water,
wings and hollow bones morph to totems, portents.
Is there freedom or courage without eagles,
mystery absent owls peering into darkness,
peace and healing minus the grace of cranes?

I need no homing pigeons
when hushed birdsong augurs anxiety and awe,
messages me on the planet’s health.
Must every feathered thing be a canary,
every backyard, street corner and hilltop a coal mine?

Emerald City Triptych: Cowardly Lion (poem)

Roaring is bravado, not bravery,
so I keep quiet courage.
No shot of whiskey
or ceremonial medal for valor can quell
my tangled jungles of anxiety.

Is my work any good?
Has my daughter found true love?
Do my jokes go over?
Will my neuropathy
leave me unable to hold a pencil?

Do I need a haircut? Did I leave a good tip?
Will my tomatoes ripen before frost?
Will the cancer of racism end
before a warming planet
is devoured by violent storms?

Bewitched by encircling fears,
I’m caught in a feline
King-of-Beasts fantasy, surviving
on the uncertainty of lion-hearted hope
where life is as scary as death.

Tin Man is HERE.  Scarecrow is HERE.

Emerald City Triptych: Scarecrow (poem)

Learning more, I know less,
my head of straw filled
with facts, trivia and stories,
an ever-expanding universe
of data and quarrelsome contradiction.

No longer can I afford
whiling away garden hours
chatting with flowers
since an information highway
has bypassed the Yellow Brick Road.

Not just a dummy counting crows,
my golden stuff can be spun
into more than thatch, hats,
baskets, bedding and biofuels
when knowing dances with imagination.

Time itself is ransacked,
and I’m stretched thin,
my stuffing tossed and spread,
a strawman locked in a frenetic quest
to know what needs to be known.

Tin Man is HERE.  Cowardly Lion is HERE.

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.

 

 

 

Fishing (poem)

Whipping his line
in great looping
arcs, a fly fisherman
stands in midstream,
mist rising, mayflies
floating in moist,
heavy air like snowflakes.

He reads riffles
and pocket water,
hearing an unfinished
song in the current.

Leaping brookie,
bent rod, he reaches
with heart as much as hand,
netting the writhing
liquefaction of flesh,
quickly releasing it, hoping
it will catch him again.

Anniversary at Equinox (poem)

for Mary

We took vows in summer,
partied in fall,
and spliced our lives
to September’s seesaw of seasons,
muggy one day, crisp the next,
moods married one to the other.

On the 22nd, a day of twos
twice blessed, we
coupled our fortunes of love
and quotidian time, making sacraments
of eating and sleeping,
sharing the blind bargains of days.

At the fulcrum of light and dark,
summer’s delights flowed
into slowly unspooling autumns.
Soon, winter’s cold will draw us
closer as time itself freezes,
and two are finally avowed as one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Tom Cameron

Deepest Summer (poem)

Possessing boundless and stifling tropical tenacity,
August rules with a slumbery and self-satisfied grip.
A season of glutinous greenery, of tangled brush,
choking vines and smothering leafy shade, it blusters
with thunder and lulls us with hazy skies and cloying
humidity that sets the skin aglow. Hypnotically
clicking crickets and dank, swampy fragrances of soil
and foliage leave us drunken in a private vegetable
lethargy.

Along roadsides, tired grasses grow raggedy,
and the heavy evening air is occasionally enlivened
with the whir of a few sentinel geese winging south.
Oak leaf edges curl brown. Maples flash
seductive patches of color. Fern clusters
are bronzed as if bitten by frost, and the luxuriant
fabric of summer begins to fade and fray,
slowly releasing its grasp and slipping away
unnoticed.