A Poem for a Thursday #132

When I was a kid I went through a stage when I was fascinated by shipwrecks. The Titanic was a particular interest but shipwrecks in general caught my imagination. They were scary and fascinating and full of stories. I remember a beach we went to on Cape Cod on a wreck way out on the horizon and I always wished I could visit it somehow. I like this poem by Adrienne Rich even though my interest in shipwrecks does not include an interest in diving. Reading about them is definitely the way to go for me.

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers 
the grave and awkward mask.
I am 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 is 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 pemament
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 
among the tentative haunters.

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-eaten log 
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage 
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of mythis
in which 
our names do not appear.

Diving Into the Wreck
Adrienne Rich

Visit Brona for another poem this week.