Adrienne Rich - Diving into the Wreck lyrics

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 it'self 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