“Oklawaha, Divided,” a very different and much longer, more narrative poem that appears in the book’s second section, showcases Haskins’ range, and embodies her exploration of the dual types of asylum. In the poem, the speaker and a companion travel by boat along Florida’s Oklawaha River, observing the ruin brought to the river’s ecosystem by damming:
Between here and the Silver Run lie acres of trees
drowned for the sakes of men and women who fish
not for food but for trophies, who don’t see the point
of anything that can’t be hung gape-mouthed from
a hook. Under this bland reach were dozens of
green-and-russet curves lined with laurel oak
and palm, and cypresses at whose feet spider lilies
shone like stars.
The Oklawaha is asylum, a place of refuge, for Haskins’ speaker and for the more-than-human beings who make their home there. Presumably the river is also refuge, or at least important, to the men and women fishing for trophies. Yet people are destroying this particular beloved place. This is true insanity, the poem seems to suggest, this willful harming of the earth that sustains us, both literally and metaphorically. In the poem, the roar of water over the dam becomes “the roar of the beast called money” that “believes / it will always win.”
In Haskins’ emotionally and perceptually nuanced view, though, things aren’t this simple. “But not yet,” the next sentence of the poem asserts, before cascading into a litany of the animals that still inhabit the river and its banks. The poem witnesses both beauty and devastation, pondering past and present and the complementary powers of the natural world and art to inspire joy: “I feel / what I felt when I was a child and turned / a page full of print and suddenly there // they were: antelopes, thousands of them / spread across an African plain...”
Finally, “Oklawaha, Divided” resists the easy dichotomy of us / them, the “we” who love the river vs. those who simply use it. Though the poem begins with a sharp sense of division between the speaker and the people fishing, by the final stanzas it’s clear that the speaker has been on a journey into her own interior. Near the mouth of the St. Johns River, the boat turns back toward the reservoir, and “we have to face again what we / drowned,” the speaker implicating herself in the damage she sees even as her relationship to the fishermen remains complicated, inhabiting a shadow-realm in which she cannot fully identify with them but also cannot stand separate. As it began, “Oklawaha, Divided” ends with a “we”: “we / who claim to love freedom but fold our hands”—but this final “we” is thorny, tangled, radically changed from the “we” who first set out on the river. It’s a “we” still seeking the inner and outer freedom Clare sought, but aware of the connectedness and responsibility inherent in that freedom.
“Those who do not or cannot adhere to the culture’s norms and ideologies remain unassimilable,” poet Cynthia Cruz writes in her collection of essays, Disquieting. “Often such people are called ‘insane’...[P]rior to the ‘age of reason,’ those who we now call ‘insane’ lived among us—on the margins, but not banished—and were considered by some to be prophets.”2 John Clare, Asylum’s spirit guide, can be seen as one such prophet, in his refusal to remain bound either by the physical asylum or his culture’s definition of sanity. Inspired by him, Lola Haskins’ poems also refuse rules and easy answers, as they search for refuge within the infinitely troubled, infinitely starry world.
1 Hirshfield, Jane. Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. New York: HarperCollins, 1997.
2 Cruz, Cynthia. Disquieting: Essays on Silence. Toronto: Bookthug, 2019.