Poems (Marianne Moore)/BLACK EARTH

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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, fibred 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
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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?
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