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PWB Peeps Open Thread: Poetry of Moore [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-09-15  

Black Earth

by Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

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?

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 27, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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