Please give a line by line explication of "Cooks Brook" by Al Pittman.

"Cooks Brook" by Al Pittman is primarily a poem about
fear. The fear that the speaker feels about cliff-diving is not irrational, however, but
very real. After all, he's diving into a natural pool, guarded by a "shelf of rock/ That
lay two feet below the surface/
And reached quarter of the way out/into the
width of the pool."

There is another sense of fear at work
here, however, that comes in the form of peer pressure. The speaker would rather plunge
to certain death, "Knowing full well/ It would be better to die/ Skull smashed open in
the water/ Than it would be to climb
Backwards down to the beach." The speaker
must juggle these fears and decide which to confront.

At
the end of the poem, we find out that this isn't the only fear that the speaker deals
with. He walks casually to the shore,

readability="6">

As though it was every day of the
week
[he] daringly defied the demons
Who lived so
terribly
In the haunted hours of [his]
sleep

There are other fears
at play here for the speaker. Cliff-diving is one way that he has chosen to deal with
them.