I'll read one more poem from this book,
and then I want to read some new poems.
"Diving into the Wreck."
"First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of a knife-blade,
I put on the body armor of black rubber, the absurd flippers,
the grave and awkward mask.
I'm having to do this, not like Cousteau
with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner,
but here alone.
There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there, hanging innocently, close
to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for, we who have used it.
Otherwise, it's a piece of maritime floss,
some sundry equipment.
I go down.
Rung after rung and still the oxygen
immerses me, the blue light, the clear atoms of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder,
and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin.
First the air is blue, and then it
is bluer, and then green, and then black.
I am blacking out, and yet my mask is powerful.
It pumps my blood with power.
The sea is another story.
The sea is not a question of power.
I have to learn alone to turn my body without force
in the deep element.
And now-- it is easy to forget what I came for,
among so many who have always lived here,
swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs.
And besides, you breathe differently down here.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly
along the flank of something more
permanent than fish or weed.
The thing I came for--
the wreck and not the story of the wreck--
the thing itself, and not the myth.
The drowned face always staring toward the sun, the evidence
of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty,
the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion
against the tentative waters.
This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black,
the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently about the wreck.
We dive into the hold.
I am she.
I am he whose drowned face sleeps
with open eyes, whose breasts still bear the stress, whose
silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels,
Half wedged and left to rot.
We are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course, the water eating
log, the fouled compass.
We are, I am, you are--
by cowardice or courage--
the one who find our way back to the scene,
carrying a knife, a camera, a book of myths in which
our names do not appear."