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.
Point at which literal (scuba dive) begins to separate from figurative (dive into the unconscious)
I always see the ladder as sort of her backbone -- as if she is climbing down inside herself.

                        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
Threshold-- she almost backs out.  but what saves her is her mask--personna, her idea of who she is.
                        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 away 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
She is similar to the mer-people in that she is down there too.
on the figurative level these are parts of herself that she didn't know about.
The he and she continue in the next stanza and are revealed to be parts of the ship.  The ship is her subconscious but it is also her body.  He and She also refers to anima/ animus in Jung: the need to confront our whole selves, including the opposite gender parts of our selves we have repressed..

                        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.
Connection to others.  She says that this journey is one that everyone takes.  We all have to divc into our own wrecks and confront who we really are.  And all we have to do it with are a few tokens-- defenses, our memory, and stories about what were supposed to find that may not be relevant to us. (Maybe it is especially hard for women to find a book of myths, stories that tell what is really in their minds).