Poem by Marianne Moore

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

    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?

1. Diligence Is to Magic as Progress Is to Flight
2. “He Wrote the History Book”, It Said
3. Feed Me, Also, River God
4. To a Steam Roller
5. Those Various Scalpels

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