For his 170th column of American Life in Poetry, the former poet laureate offers Sam Green’s “Night Dive.”
About Sam Green’s poem, Kooser writes: “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.”
For a sample of the opening stanza of “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,
To read the rest of Green’s poem, please go to American Life in Poetry: Column 170.
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