afieldnotebook

Black Earth

Openly, yes,
---------With the naturalness
---------Of the hippopotamus or the alligator
When it climbs out on the bank to experience the

Sun, I do these
Things which I do, which please
---------No one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am sub-
---------Merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object

In view was a
Renaissance; shall I say
---------The contrary? The sediment of the river which
---------Encrusts my joints, makes me very gray but I am used

To it, it may
Remain there; do away
---------With it and I am myself done away with, for the
---------Patina of circumstance can but enrich what was

There to begin
With. This elephant skin
---------Which I inhabit, fibered over like the shell of
---------The coco-nut, this piece of black glass through which no light

Can filter—cut
Into checkers by rut
---------Upon rut of unpreventable experience—
---------It is a manual for the peanut-tongued and the

Hairy toed. Black
But beautiful, my back
---------Is full of the history of power. Of power? What
---------Is powerful and what is not? My soul shall never

Be cut into
By a wooden spear; through-
---------Out childhood to the present time, the unity of
---------Life and death has been expressed by the circumference

Described by my
Trunk; nevertheless, I
---------Perceive feats of strength to be inexplicable after
---------All; and I am on my guard; external poise, it

Has its centre
Well nurtured—we know
---------Where—in pride, but spiritual poise, it has its centre where ?
---------My ears are sensitized to more than the sound of

The wind. I see
And I hear, unlike the
---------Wandlike body of which one hears so much, which was made
---------To see and not to see; to hear and not to hear,

That tree trunk without
Roots, accustomed to shout
---------Its own thoughts to itself like a shell, maintained intact
---------By who knows what strange pressure of the atmosphere; that

Spiritual
Brother to the coral
---------Plant, absorbed into which, the equable sapphire light
---------Becomes a nebulous green. The I of each is to

The I of each,
A kind of fretful speech
---------Which sets a limit on itself; the elephant is?
---------Black earth preceded by a tendril? It is to that

Phenomenon
The above formation,
---------Translucent like the atmosphere—a cortex merely—
---------That on which darts cannot strike decisively the first

Time, a substance
Needful as an instance
---------Of the indestructibility of matter; it
---------Has looked at the electricity and at the earth-

Quake and is still
Here; the name means thick. Will
---------Depth be depth, thick skin be thick, to one who can see no
---------Beautiful element of unreason under it?

-Marianne Moore, 1918