I mined this poem from the literary Spring 2014 edition of the journal Ploughshares. The poet Tatiana Oroño was born in San José, Uruguay, in 1947. She is the author of several works including La Piedra Nada Sabe (Estuario, 2008), Morada móvil (Artefato, 2004), and Tout fut ce qui ne fut pas/ Todo tuvo la forma que no tuvo (Éscrits des Forges, 2002).
I deeply appreciate its simplicity and imagery which evokes a biblical image of the ocean as the realm of chaos and death (see Genesis 1, Psalm 104, Revelation 21).
Aporia, by Tatiana Oroño
Translated from the Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval
Ocean, there is none
Without shipwrecks, without the drowned
Without victims
there is no
ocean
that does not lick the shore
like a sore
or a wound