Alfred Kreymborg, ed. Others for 1919. 1920.
Marianne Moore
Black Earth
O
With the naturalness
Of the hippopotamus or the alligator
When it climbs out on the bank to experience the
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
Renaissance; shall I say
The contrary? The sediment of the river which
Encrusts my joints, makes me very gray but I am used
Remain there; do away
With it and I am myself done away with, for the
Patina of circumstance can but enrich what was
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
Into checkers by rut
Upon rut of unpreventable experience—
It is a manual for the peanut-tongued and the
But beautiful, my back
Is full of the history of power. Of power? What
Is powerful and what is not? My soul shall never
By a wooden spear; through-
Out childhood to the present time, the unity of
Life and death has been expressed by the circumference
Trunk; nevertheless, I
Perceive feats of strength to be inexplicable after
All; and I am on my guard; external poise, it
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
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,
Roots, accustomed to shout
Its own thoughts to itself like a shell, maintained intact
By who knows what strange pressure of the atmosphere; that
Brother to the coral
Plant, absorbed into which, the equable sapphire light
Becomes a nebulous green. The I of each is to
A kind of fretful speech
Which sets a limit on itself; the elephant is?
Black earth preceded by a tendril? It is to that
The above formation,
Translucent like the atmosphere—a cortex merely—
That on which darts cannot strike decisively the first
Needful as an instance
Of the indestructibility of matter; it
Has looked at the electricity and at the earth-
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?