TRANSCRIPT

Today’s episode is guest hosted by Samiya Bashir.

I’m Samiya Bashir, and this is The Slowdown. 

The other day, a friend of mine was caught in a transportation hold-up. Her train was stuck, then rerouted; her journey was about to get a lot longer and more circuitous. My response to her then, which–rather miraculously–she found helpful, was to make it an adventure! 

Our most important journeys often take us through vistas that we hadn’t, couldn’t, even imagine when we took our first steps. Leaning into adventure forces us to embrace uncertainty. 

Sometimes we have to follow the road where it goes; sometimes paving a new road is the only way to reach our intended destination. Either way, where we land might not look like we thought it would. Either way, we are unlikely to arrive as the same person we were when our journey began.

Today’s poem takes us into the adventure of discovery which, it turns out, is rarely simple. Even when we are at our most prepared. Even when we think we’re sure what we’re going to find.

Diving into the Wreck
by Adrienne Rich

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. 

“Diving into the Wreck” by Adrienne Rich from DIVING INTO THE WRECK: POEMS 1971-1972 © 2013 Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company and the Frances Goldin Literary Agency.