If you often ponder the difference between yourself and the cosmic,

If you love and care about women’s minds, women’s bodies, and women's warmth,

If you crave and abhor intimacy at the same time,

If you’ve felt the fire of breaking free from something,

If you have dared to dive within yourself to assess the damage of living,

and if you’re trying to muster the courage to do just that,

then you must read Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck.

Feminist, lesbian, activist poet and essayist, Rich’s career spanned over half a century. She was prolific, and she left her mark on the writing world. Like many who have encountered her work, I feel affected and seen by Rich’s writing. When she passed in 2012, I was just starting to understand the power and value of language, and of my own body. When I first read Rich’s collection Diving into the Wreck in full a few years after her death, I was trying to learn how to take myself seriously as a young, female poet. I grieve her mind every time I pass through these pages filled with tiny rebellions, women-as-mythical-beasts, existential considerations, disembodied Dickinsonian eyeballs, and more.

At the age of ten, my family relocated from South Carolina to the Colorado Rockies. Away from all our family besides Uncle Al, Aunt Ginger, and their daughter, Abagail, who was born only three months earlier than me. We grew close with that small unit of our family so removed from the Atlantic hub. Uncle Al was stationed at the Army base in Colorado Springs, and we would visit them as often as we could. During one visit, Uncle Al, Aunt Ginger, Abagail and I went to the community pool on base. It was indoors and had two large rectangular pools, as far as I can recall, one for laps and another for diving. The locker rooms had adjoining saunas and hot tubs. Everything was gray and serious, not at all like the pools I was used to back east where everyone was hot, laughing, pushing floaties aside for impromptu chicken fights, and burnt as hell. The base pool was quiet, cold, and meant for training, not necessarily for pleasure. The games we played: How long can you tread water in the deep end? How long can you hold your breath underwater?

Feeling brave, on this visit to the pool, I worked up the nerve to scale the ladder of the 20-foot diving platform. Around this time, I was reading young adult novels that featured outwardly and brashly brave heroines. I asked Uncle Al to teach me how to do real push-ups, the ones in full plank with elbows tucked in. I learned to throw knives and punches. How to shoot a bow. How to thrust my elbows at noses (should I ever need to). I thought of course I’m not scared, I know water. Surely my east coast blood would be good for something. She’s a fish, my father would say.

The anxiety held my body in a tight, locked line as I attempted the dive. I glanced to the side while I tumbled toward the water and saw the world race to meet me. I landed on the water hard, overextended my back, and had to be helped out of the pool. In the shock of the pain, I inhaled some water and floundered in the deep. Upon my rescue, I shook, cried, and held my low back with both hands. It felt like something had exploded down there. Guessing I was probably just coming down from the adrenaline, my aunt ushered me into the hot tub room, closed the door, and left me there alone in the bubbling water. Abagail was still swimming and needed to be watched. I sat and hated my body, hated my nervousness, hated my inability to stop the tears. This was supposed to be my moment. My graceful, effervescent descent. My body grown strong and mesmerizing.

I was not ready to make that dive. The sensitivity in my low back haunts me still in cat-cow, and when arching myself into anything. Kisses mostly. Looking up for too long.

Sometimes, and especially when I read the namesake piece of Rich’s collection, I am reminded of my body flailing in the cold, chlorinated water of the Army base pool. I watch the oxygen bubble up and away from my mouth.

I go down.

Rung after rung and still

the oxygen immerses me

in 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.

(“Diving into the Wreck”)

For months after my failed dive, I complained of low back pain to my mother. I couldn’t stand for more than a couple of minutes without needing to sit. A diver out of water. I was “[putting] on the body-armor of black rubber / the absurd flippers / the grave and awkward mask” every time I looked at my crooked posture and changing body in the mirror. Eventually, the pain became bearable, or maybe the muscles surrounding the hurt strengthened to support it. Who knows. Maybe the pain was an imagined one. Maybe my spine was just extending as I grew. Whatever the cause, that year I began to embrace the sitting. In criss-cross applesauce, I learned to knit, play music, and draw. And write. Turns out that my “ladder was always there,” waiting for me to brave my own shipwreck. I wrote imitations of those copy-paste-outwardly-and-brashly-brave-heroines. I wrote my first poems.

When I found Rich, she gave voice to the simultaneous energy, force, and violence I felt within me. It had no gender, though I was made to feel more masculine by wanting to be strong like my father, my uncle, my brother. I wanted my body to be the vector and vessel for it all:

...I’ve walked before

like a man, like a woman, in the city

my visionary anger cleaning my sight

…I am the androgyne

I am the living mind you fail to describe

(“The Stranger”)

Reading these lines, and others, I found a place to exist in a complicated feminine body surrounded by gendered constraints. Suffocated by a desire to be valued both for my strengths and capabilities, my softness and beauty.

My “wreck” is also a scarred one, but Rich praises the scarred body as “A cave of scars!” in which scars are normalized and constant:

ancient, archaic wallpaper

built up, layer on layer

from the earliest, dream-white

to yesterday’s, a red-black scrawl

(“Meditations For a Savage Child”)

When I wake up and have to allow myself extra minutes or hours to find enough energy to actually and fully rise, when I remember all the lost friendships, when words won’t come, I feel another ding on the hull of my ship. Soothing the edges of those dings, the scars on the wreck, takes constant effort and resignation to the process of living. It takes an extra cup of coffee. It takes lavender oil on the soles of your feet. It takes balling up your fists and almost punching the door. It takes a friend asking you how you are doing and wanting the real answer. It takes a poem.

…I have to learn alone

to turn my body without force

in the deep element…

Diving into the Wreck is for survivors and seekers. Those needing healing or hands to hold them on the way out of the water.

the thing I came for:

the wreck and not the story of the wreck

the thing itself and not the myth

(“Diving into the Wreck”)