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.

In these lines (29–33), the speaker describes their initial descent down the ladder that stretches from the boat into the water. Two points are worth noting here. First, the speaker’s descent is challenging and even dangerous. The gear they require to make this dive possible is cumbersome, and the large flippers on their feet get in the way of their descent, virtually crippling the speaker’s movement. In this regard, the above passage forecasts other challenges during the descent. For instance, once the speaker is in the water and begins their descent, the diminishing light clouds their vision, and the increasing atmospheric pressure makes them feel like “blacking out” (line 36). In addition to the challenge of the descent, the speaker emphasizes how they are alone on their journey. This is a point that the speaker has already made in the first stanza, where they compare their solo dive to the famous French explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau and his team of assistants. Here, the speaker reiterates the fact that they’re alone on this journey—a fact that makes the dive that much more perilous.

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.

After describing the mental and physical difficulty of the descent, the speaker regains their sense of purpose and utters these lines (61–70). This passage marks a turning point in the poem, as the speaker redirects attention from their journey to the ocean floor to the wreck. This redirection of attention parallels a broader thematic shift. This shift involves the speaker setting aside the “story” or “myth” that merely represents the wreck and focusing instead on their first-hand investigation of the wreck as a material reality. In this context, the drowned face is interesting because it blurs the distinction between reality and representation. It’s real insofar as it’s the ship’s figurehead. Yet it’s also representational insofar as it stands for those unfortunate souls who may have perished with the ship. The hint of personification in the phrase “the drowned face” enables this link. The speaker continues making veiled references to the possible victims by drawing attention to the broken parts of the ship. See especially the phrase “the ribs of the disaster,” where ribs refers both to the broken planks of wood that run the ship’s length and to the exposed ribs of the fish-eaten skeletons of the dead.

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

In these lines (71–77), the speaker begins by affirming that they’ve physically arrived at the site of the wreck. Yet something odd happens here, as the speaker suddenly seems to split in two. In the second and third lines of the above passage, they identify themself first as a “mermaid,” then as a “merman.” Afterward, they set aside the first-person singular pronoun “I” and take up the plural “we.” Though the speaker returns to the “I” at the end of the passage, their sense of self remains bifurcated into masculine and feminine parts: “I am she: I am he.” Thus, the speaker adopts the perspective of an androgynously gendered plural being. We could interpret this move in at least two ways. First, the speaker could be expressing their own androgyny or nonbinary gender. If we understand the wreck as a metaphor for the speaker’s own experience, this expression of androgyny could represent a moment of self-discovery. Alternatively, the speaker could be adopting a plural perspective to speak for others. Specifically, they may be speaking for all those whose lives and experiences have been excluded from the “book of myths,” as the speaker implies in the poem’s final lines.

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