Wild Juice

Poems

Ashley Mace Havird, Dave Smith

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780807175248
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

In Wild Juice, the poet and novelist Ashley Mace Havird confronts global and personal change. Her subjects range from the extinction of a prehuman species to the present-day reduction in sea life due to the climate crisis. Closer to home, she confronts the death of her father and her own aging. Running throughout these lyrics of loss is the richness of communal life, a current of hope given substance by the juice of wild grapes that baptizes the poet's chin and that of her elderly father, whose presence haunts the book. Havird's poems move from sea coasts to the rural South to landlocked suburbia, in language characterized by wit, pluck, and ironic candor. Through striking evocations of the natural world, conveyed in a voice steeped in mature human experience, Wild Juice speaks memorably on behalf of a life that embraces us all.

Vanishing Act

Diving before Dawn

Over your eyes, clearer eyes.

Over your skin, thicker skin.

Your breath heavy on your back

until the sea lifts it and lowers you

as though you are a small child

onto the silt floor.

Open your light. Find what it finds.

Parrotfish in crevices levitate in spun clouds

of their own making. Filefish rest

motionless in fingers of sea rods,

turtles drift in a sunken tugboat’s hull.

The night garden grows.

Anemones open like hands of newborns.

Purple sponges glow as though lit from within.

Coral blooms all over itself. . . .

It is the time of the night-hunters.

Octopi pulse their sacs of greenish light.

Morays, mouths agape, prowl the reef.

Silvery tarpon sidle up and follow your beam

to small sleepers. A snapper

snaps down a damselfish.

Outside your circle of light,

shapes take shape.

Luminescence sparks blue.

The parrotfish stirs, shakes off its cocoon

which thins away in your slow-motion hands.

Dawn filters down. Tiny spiderlike shrimp

groom an open-mouthed grouper.

For half a breath, a pair of banded butterflies—

still-life above a yellow tube sponge.

Now, all is motion. Schools of sergeant majors,

blue tang, chromis. Tagalong angels,

trumpets, durgons. Day-hunters.

Near surface, silversides open their curtain,

deliver you to the sun-hard world

of your weight on feet. Flat walls

at right angles, voices, machines.

Tour of Grief

Heat waves, wildfires . . . Waves

of migrants, children ripped from parents—

their blankets of glittering foil.

Polar thaw . . . and the slick

curve of a whale’s black back,

her laboring spout—beside her head,

small dorsal fin. A killer whale

with her dead calf. Tahlequah.

With forehead and fin

nudging the calf to the surface.

Floating it there on her rostrum.

Clutching its tail in her mouth.

The calf breathed long enough

for milk to come, for it to nurse,

for her to bond. Its blowhole sputtered. Flukes

fell still. In spite of currents, waves—

Tahlequah, Two

Together. How human her grief seems,

even scientists marvel.

With trills and clicks and whistles,

other whales in the pod

offer ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Skull Mount
• Gone to Wild
• Vanishing Act
• This Unhealing
• Phantom Limbs
• Notes and Dedications