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 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
myths
in which
our names
do not appear.
