text: 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 filtercut
  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 nurturedwe know
           Wherein 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 atmospherea 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?