- 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 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 away 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 myths
- in which
- our names do not appear.