February 2006
Two Poems by Ashley David
Listen to "The Salton Sea" mp3  (requires audio plugin)
The Salton Sea
Where the wind blows and the palm fronds rattle,
Soul food grows for the plenitude—
corvina, tilapia, sargo, gulf croaker.
A thatched shack stocked with Nehi and smoked mullet
stands beside the pier where a brown pelican
stops on the Pacific Flyway south.
The thing about the sea
is that opposite wills are at work.
The salt kills prey unless the waters rise.
Peace on the surface belies
a reservoir of shifting volume.
Some cling to the affair, but
retirees and illegal aliens have no clout
when waters glow hot.
The phases of the lake
want paralysis.
This desert sealet is placid unless
the wind kicks up. And now sentinel chickens
announce a vector-borne virus on the shore.
A Salton Sea obituary reads:
Eden, where is the snake of wisdom,
The serpent before it lost its feet?
American Chestnut
Listen to "American Chestnut " mp3 (requires audio plugin)
It's liquid light again
Thick and thin at the same time
Humus sweat curls up through it
In place of the forest
From Maine to Georgia and out to Michigan
Blighted stands no more
Tannin no more timber no more queen
Of the eastern forests
No deep broad-rounded crowns
Resisting decay
Perfect for posts poles piling
Split-rail fences
Straight-grained lightweight easy to build
Log cabins furniture a casket
Swollen and sunken ocher
Cankers on limbs and trunks
Cracks and bark
Fungus spread inward to girdle
The leaves then the limbs
A swift death to an old friend
Graceful shade cash crop felled
Within forty years only gray ghosts standing
Ashley David will receive her MFA in creative writing this spring. She won a 2005 Hopwood Award for poetry by a graduate student. A native of Albany, Georgia, David grew up in Georgia, South Carolina and Southern California. David hosts the Wednesday 4:30-5:15 (EST) Living Writers Show on student radio station WCBN-FM, 88.3 The show can be accessed on the Web at showtime at http://wcbn.org.
After finishing high school in Massachusetts and college at Stanford, she spent a year in Indonesia as a family planning and maternal/child health volunteer in the Volunteers in Asia program. David traveled widely before returning to the States, where she worked in an environmental nonprofit in San Francisco, on schooners in the North Atlantic and for Maine public radio.
David next entered New York University's graduate program in cultural anthropology and followed that up with a job in the indie film business. She then moved to Wall Street, where "being able to write and knowing how to understand a culture" were strong assets. She also credits her father for providing her with sound advice in business matters. David started a dot-com business in California, and when that played out she worked in marketing for the Stanford Alumni Association before coming to Michigan to study creative writing.
"I work in multiple genres, poetry and prose," David says, "so this was an ideal program for me. Richard Tillinghast was a special mentor in poetry for me, but then he retired. Khaled Mattawa, Laurence Goldstein and Lorna Goodison have also taught me a lot. In prose, Nicholas Delbanco, Eileen Pollack and Anne Carson have all helped me tremendously. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the poet Ray McDaniel who has been working with me informally since I arrived in Ann Arbor. I was once told, when you find a great teacher, just learn whatever they're teaching. And that's what I've tried to do."
David is preparing the Hopwood-winning manuscript, "Who Are Your People, Sugar?" for publication and looking for teaching jobs.
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