Welcome back to The Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Adrian Rich. She was an American poet, an essayist, who lived from 1929 to 2012.

And she's often called, quote, one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century.

Her first collection, which was called a change of world, was selected by W.H. Aoudon, for the Yale series of younger poets awards.

She received the National Medal of the Arts, or at least was awarded it, but then declined the vote after Speaker Newt Gingrich voted to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.

It's a pretty famous moment in her life.

The poem that I'm going to read today is probably her most famous one, certainly one of her more

famous poems, and it's called Diving Into the Rec. It's a little bit long compared to most of the poems that I read on this show,

but it's a pretty quick read, given that. So here it is. Adrienne Rich is 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'm having to do this, not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-floated 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, wrung after wrung, 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'm 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,

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