Joseph McLaughlin recently retired as an associate professor of English at Stark State College of Technology in Canton, Ohio. His most recent book of poems is Memory, In Your Country (Pale Horse Press, 1995). "The Deep" commemorates the 1932 drowning death of American poet Hart Crane who, as a youth, lived in nearby Garrettsville, Ohio. Crane's drowning — at the ominous and dangerous age of 33 — in the Caribbean was thought to be a suicide.