Clade Song 5

first Spanish then the English

White Ocean

for Brian Nissan

The ocean’s music detonates
in the silence of the white light.

Always a new disorder,
a miracle of each singular moment.
the flight of the arrow
transformed on the target.

The gaze dissolves
in the ocean, broken mirrors
spraying light in all directions.

The ocean’s pounding
always pursues the calm
of the suspended gaze
where all light is music,
translucent spume that stalls
for an instant
then falls.

Night will come
as white as everything
to illuminate its mysteries
in the empty space of the ocean.
Ever present night,
the white ocean builds
and destroys its own history
in the dark hours
with a sway of silent brightness
that erupt in its profundities of light.

Marcelo Uribe is the author of “Ultima Función” which was a finalist for the Premio Iberoamericano de Poesía Jaime Sabines 2009. He is editor for Ediciones Era from 1991 to the present.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was born in Zacatecas, Mexico, and crossed the border through Tijuana at the age of five. He is a Canto Mundo fellow, a Zell post-graduate fellow and the first undocumented student to graduate from the University of Michigan’s MFA program. He was a finalist for the New England Review Emerging Writer Award and his manuscript was a finalist for the Alice James Book Prize. With Javier Zamora and Christopher Soto, he initiated the Undocupoets campaign against first book prize discrimination.

CD Wright was born and raised in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. She has published over a dozen books, including Rising, Falling, Hovering, Like Something Flying Backwards: New and Selected Poems, and a text edition of One Big Self: An Investigation, focused on Louisiana inmates. She has published several book-length poems including Deepstep Come Shining and Just Whistle. Wright is former State Poet of Rhode Island and with poet Forrest Gander she edited Lost Roads Publishers for over twenty years.