"Turbulent Ferry, Evening," Ron Slate

To spend one's stored power
keeping watch, taking responsibility
for the wanton and the dull.
Mainland to island and back.

In these mythic rips, a myopic yacht drifts
until the force cleaves it exactly
midships, in a lazy mist.

To ease into the slip
so many times in a lifetime
that the act becomes imponderable.
So ingrained in its restraint
like a future saint moving into marble.

After the stern door cranks down
and a ballast of breath debarks,
the ferry feels a great peace
it doesn't have, spreading in light chop,
in the chilling autumn soundwater.

Because the island blinks in demand,
because the ferry has no serenity,
in vigilance it knots a dim pleasure
supposing such calmness exists.

From The Incentive of the Maggot.

Two other poems from this collection, "Warm Canto" and "Shame," appeared recently in Slate, while "Safe Passage" was in the centennial issue of the Threepenny Review. Slate is the most recent winner of Bread Loaf's Bakeless Prize for poetry; judge Robert Pinsky found them "American poems in which political forces are imagined with passion and understanding, accorded all the restraint and astonishing density of the real."