“An Apophatic Heart”. The Ocean Poem of Tom Buron, Ascetic & Corsair

In English they are called the Furious Fifties – biting winds, sperm whale gusts. They are on the 50th parallel of the southern hemisphere; stateless on the extreme edge of Patagonia, on the heels of New Zealand, scattered a few yards from Antarctica. They speak of mighty depressions, they speak of the clash – lethal, volcanic – between the flames of the oceans and the cold of the Antarctic divinity. We should tell the perplexed progress of civi…