Photo courtesy sailormn34

Introduction by Ted Kooser: I’ve lived all my life on the plains, where no body of water is more than a few feet deep, and even at that shallow depth I’m afraid of it. Here Sam Green, who lives on an island north of Seattle, takes us down into some really deep, dark water.

Night Dive

Down here, no light but what we carry with us.

Everywhere we point our hands we scrawl

color: bulging eyes, spines, teeth or clinging tentacles.

At negative buoyancy, when heavy hands

seem to grasp & pull us down, we let them,

we don’t inflate our vests, but let the scrubbed cheeks

of rocks slide past in amniotic calm.

At sixty feet we douse our lights, cemented

by the weight of the dark, of water, the grip

of the sea’s absolute silence. Our groping

hands brush the open mouths of anemones,

which shower us in particles of phosphor

radiant as halos. As in meditation,

or in deepest prayer,

there is no knowing what we will see.

One of the privileges of being U.S. Poet Laureate was to choose two poets each year to receive a $10,000 fellowship, funded by the Witter Bynner Foundation. Joseph Stroud, who lives in California, was one of my choices. This poem is representative of his clear-eyed, imaginative poetry. [Introduction by Ted Kooser.]

Night in Day

The night never wants to end, to give itself over   

to light. So it traps itself in things: obsidian, crows.   

Even on summer solstice, the day of light’s great   

triumph, where fields of sunflowers guzzle in the sun—   

we break open the watermelon and spit out   

black seeds, bits of night glistening on the grass.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2009 by Joseph Stroud, and reprinted from his recent book of poems, “Of This World: New and Selected Poems 1966-2006,” Copper Canyon Press, 2009, by permission of the author and publisher. Introduction copyright © 2013 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.

—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross