Sunday Poem: Adrienne Rich

Diving into the Wreck

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
and 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'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
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.

Adrienne Rich has been a leading figure in American poetry since winning the prestigious Yale Younger Poets award for her first book in 1951. Since then, she has published book after book of deeply personal and socially relevant poetry. While often claimed by the "women's movement" as one of their leading voices due to Rich's openness about being a lesbian and her activism for women's rights, Rich transcends any single puropse to her life and work. She is first and foremost an American poet.

Rich won the National Book Award in 1974 for Diving into the Wreck (which she accepted jointly with Alice Walker and Audre Lorde in the name of all women who are silenced). She has also been awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships, the first Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Brandeis Creative Arts Medal, the Common Wealth Award, the William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the National Poetry Association Award for Distinguished Service to the Art of Poetry.

I was a young man in college when I first read this poem in an Introduction to Literature class taught by professor James Dean (to whom I am forever indebted). In that class he us taught that literature offers a path into the deeper realms of human experience, and he encouraged us to explore those realms within the works we studied and within ourselves. Nearly everything we read for those three quarters moved us further into the interior of what it means to be human.

I was a psychology major when I took those classes, and this poem spoke to me about the process of Jungian myth work, of which I was enamored at the time. I saw in Adrienne Rich's poem a revisioning of the hero myth, a feminization of the hero's quest. There is no dragon to slay, no kingdom to save. There is only the Self and its quest for wholeness. This is the central, most powerful myth underlying modern psychology: that through introspection, self-awareness, and understanding we can gather the riches of our innate humanity.

This poem provided me with the template for my own efforts as a poet. I dedicated myself to the exploration of the wreck that lies in the depths of my psyche, to the exploration of "the wreck and not the story of the wreck."

A few years after first reading this poem, I immersed myself in the alchemical psychology of Jung and became especially interested in the idea of the alchemical wedding--the union of masculine and feminine elements in the psyche that can provide a new sense of wholeness and balance. Rich is working with the same theme here, being both mermaid and merman: "I am she: I am he." Yet it is only after entering the hold of the wreck, the symbolic container of the alchemical process, that the poet recognizes the unification of her duality and can proclaim, "We are."

For other critical assessments of the poem, click here.