Black Earth

 

                                    (Nasa Earth Observatory)

Black Earth

by Marianne Moore

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, it 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 indestructability 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?

BIO: With Bachelor degrees in biology and histology, Marianne Moore often used nature to convey profound observations about life. She was born in 1887, worked as the Editor of Dial

from 1925 - 1929, and created her best work in the 1930s and 1940s. Her Collected Poems (1951) earned her the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and a National Book Award. In 1953, she won the Bollingen Prize. The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore appeared in 1967. Before her death in 1972, she was given an honorary doctorate from Harvard University.