The Great Wave

By Ron Slate

In his acclaimed debut collection The Incentive of the Maggot, Ron Slate delivered an ingenious and enigmatic account of the intersections of global, family and personal histories. Now, in The Great Wave, a more personal tone asserts itself as Slate fashions poignant and haunting poems that shock us with a recognition of our perilous times. These are poems of strange and sometimes caustic assessment, reflecting on family, the work life, catastrophe, creativity, solitude, and desire—tracking the transit between reality and the imagination, and creating the sound of its discoveries. Seductive, demanding, witty, and embittered, Slate’s voice comes from a secret, intimate space abutting a large, incongruous world.

The poems in The Great Wave, so taken with the collisions between history and contemporary life, remind us that the role of poetry is to confirm our existence by giving shape to the inner world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 8, 2009
• ISBN: 9780547393858

Ron Slate

RON SLATE is the author of The Incentive of the Maggot, nominated for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize of the Academy of American Poets. In over 30 years of business experience, he was vice president of global communications for a Fortune 500 technology company, chief operating officer of a life sciences company, and a co-founder of a social network for family caregivers. He lives in Milton, Massachusetts.

Book preview

To the One Who Hears Me

In the fifth year of friendship

he asked permission to tell his secret,

suggesting we go to a donut shop nearby.

Grand theft, drug dealing, a year on Rikers Island.

Now I have hustled you to this other spot

without even a cup of coffee to offer

nor for that matter to take you

into my confidence.

The great felons exceed the petty thieves

in intuition, the greatness unmeasured

by the size or value of what is removed,

but rather in the shuffle and the shift.

The shock was not in the details,

the carjacking of a famous quarterback's convertible,

actually his wife's, but my realizing

he recognized the level of my listening.

This intimacy—all to help him appear to grasp

the vexing source of manic energy

agitating everyone on the job.

In the telling, he in his suit became a white man

selling crack out of a red Saab

with the top down three blocks north

of MLK Boulevard. His former roommate, the quarterback,

helped spring him early with a personal appeal.

He was saying: Make use of me,

all my skills are now at your disposal,

trust my boldness, and when you discover the way

into your fortune, take me with you.

We sat in the shadow of our office tower

and he knew whom he was talking to.

Just as I am speaking to you now,

not exactly waiting for your reply.

I

Meditation by the Sea

Engines, the slitting hiss of tires on asphalt,

doors opening and slamming, footsteps on stone,

then on carpeting. Keystrokes, devices beeping.

For years these bland sounds saved me.

Welcome, they said, to our confines.

But don't think the times were uneventful.

In fact, they seemed supernal,

as when people first figured out the gods

caused the world to cohere but could perform

nothing miraculous. The coherence amazed.

Other sounds then—at the beach, my children

invented names for the rocks in the surf.

America was closest to shore, then Haystack.

Farthest out, Neptune, often invisible.

Sometimes my ear would catch the cry

of a mud swallow, or the motor of a plane

tugging a sign, or the puncture of a beer can.

But it was as if these sounds were enclosed

elsewhere, like the ear ringing, heard then forgotten.

My daughters' mouths moved soundlessly, on Haystack.

Did I begin too receptive to the world's sounds,

needing closure—or sealed from the messages,

in need of piercing? Should I try to hear

above the roar, or speak to it,

or against it?

Watch This Space

Whatever appears wants to attach emotionally.

Nothing appears.

All that might be but is not.

When there's no demand, all eyes come to me—

there's