From the collection, Blue Marble Gazetteer
Henry grabs the buoy with a boat hook, wraps the line on a winch and hauls a seven pot trawl, bits of seaweed and mud flying off the rope. Large gloved hands snatch wire cages as they surface with a dripping splutter. Muscular, with a creased, leathery face, spindly chicken legs in short pants, and bulging biceps, he’s Popeye escaped from cartoons and comic strips, shaped by seventy-five years of sun, wind, salt and tides. Caught in the wire parlor, several glossy, dark-olive lobsters scuttle about like giant Jurassic insects. Shorts and a few eggers, spider crabs and a starfish go overboard with a plop, the keepers tossed into a tank of circulating seawater. Looking out at clusters of colorful plastic buoys like a field of floating flowers, he points a finger: “Greedy sons-of-bitches,” he says in a voice rising from low growl to godly bellow, “some of these bastards with a couple thousand pots aren’t making a living, they’re doing a killing, raping the resource.” In a tattered orange apron, Henry boasts about his new Harley, cuts thick chunks of stinking, oily mackerel, stuffing them into each emptied trap, a “lobster’s gourmet fantasy.” Years ago he was bar to bar raising hell, igniting fights. Now “everyone scrambles when they see this old fuck coming,” he says. “No telling what the SOB will do.” Henry puts the baited pots on the rail, slowly piloting the boat forward, each one falling with a rhythmic splash, quickly disappearing beneath sun-sparkled green water. “There are no laws,” he explains, “just restrictions on peoples’ lives.” But he keeps close to the pulse, tying up his thirty-six-footer each night beside the police boat. Hosing mud, fish oil and debris off the deck, he guides the boat around a maze of red, blue, and purple buoys. “It’s a pirate business,” he says. “Pricks soaking pots just to hold ground when fishing sucks, sabotaging boats, cutting lines.” Henry fished until lobsters faded in warming Long Island Sound waters. A force of nature, he held on until Nature gave out. “Never pray for me,” he’d laugh. “No one gets outta here alive.”
David K. Leff is an award-winning poet and essayist, and former deputy commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection. He is the Canton, Connecticut poet laureate, deputy town historian, and town meeting moderator. He was a volunteer firefighter for 26 years.
In 2016 and 2017 David was appointed by the National Park Service to serve as poet-in-residence for the New England National Scenic Trail (NET). He has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize, and has twice been a finalist in the Connecticut Book Awards. David has received two silver medals from the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY), and was grand prize short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. His work has appeared in anthologies, newspapers such as the Hartford Courant, and magazines including Appalachia and Yankee.
The author of seven nonfiction books, three volumes of poetry, and two novels in verse, David’s work focuses on the connection of people to their communities and the natural environment. He often explores commonplace elements of the world around us that have hidden meanings and unusual links to each other.
David has been the book review editor of Connecticut Woodlands, the quarterly magazine of the Connecticut Forest & Park Association and is now poetry editor. He is a staff writer for The Wayfarer Magazine.
David’s papers are located at the Special Collections and University Archives, UMass/Amherst. View his work at www.davidkleff.com
