Now I'd like to read a poem about a different kind
of baptism.
The baptism with Earth.
I've said or tried to say something
about the pain that is felt and the love and vision that
is felt in realizing that one is part
of the universal flow of things.
But there's a contrary business, people can separate themselves
from this flow, can separate themselves
from the soil and the nature of life.
They can be too whites, they can keep themselves too clean,
can become too virginal, too uninvolved.
In this poem, there is a person performing
a rights of their psyche in which they are affirming
that they will no longer remain separate from things
as they are.
I say it is a baptism of Earth.
It's a baptism of water and Earth.
It is a baptism of mud.
I've got the poem the title of the--
I call it the idea of entropy at Maenporth beach.
This is a complex and perhaps finicky title.
Entropy, of course, is the word for disorder in physics.
Maenporth beach is somewhere in Cornwall.
The title echoes Wallace Stevens' poem.
The idea of order at Key West in which a woman organizes
the world and gives the only meaning to the meaningless sea,
the flux of existence by walking beside it and singing.
And this is the only meaning.
In my poem, I say that the disorder and the flux
has meaning for the people who can take it.
I give it an epigraph from Baudelaire, who knew all
about this kind of thing.
"C'est elle!
Noire et pourtant lumineuse."
it is she, black and shining with it.
A buggy would as full of springs as trees slowly
she slipped into the muck.
It was a white dress, she said and that was not right.
Leathery polished mud that stank as it split.
It is a smooth white body, she said and that is not right.
Not quite right.
I'll have a smoother slicker body
and my golden hair will sprinkle rich goodness everywhere.
So slowly she backed into the mud.
If it were a white dress, she said with some little black,
dressed with a little flaw a smart some swart twinge
of ancestry.
Or if it were all black since I am white, but it's my mistake.
So slowly she slung all pleated into the muck.
The mud spatters with rich seed and ranging pollens.
Black darts up the pleats.
Black pleats lance along the white ones
and she stops swaying cut in half.
Is it right?
She sobs as the fat, juicy incredibly tart muck rises
round her throat and dims the diamond there.
It is right.
So she stretches her white neck back
and takes a deep breath once and a one step back.
Some golden strands of floats pull after her.
The mud recoils, lies heavy, queasy, swart.
But then this soft blubber stirs and quickly she
comes up dressed like a mound of licorice Earth,
swiftly ascending in a streaming pet that grows tall,
smooth, brimming hips and steps out on flowing pillars darkly
draped.
And then the blackness breaks open with blue eyes
of this black Venus rising helmeted in night,
who as she glides grins brilliantly and drops
swatches superb as molasses on her path.
Who is that Negress running on the beach,
laughing excitedly with teeth as white as the white waves
kneeling dazzled to the sands?
Clapping excitedly the black rocks rise,
running delightedly in slapping rags,
she sprinkles substance and the small life flies.
She laughs aloud and bares her teeth again and cries.
Now that I am all black and running in my richness
and knowing it a little, I have learned
it is quite wrong to be all white always.
And knowing it a little I shall take great care
to keep a little black about me somewhere.
A snotty nostril, a morning nail will do.
Mud is a good dress, but not the best.
Watch she runs into the sea, she walks
in streaky white on dazzling sands
that stretch like the whole world's Percy mud quite purged.
The black rooks who like dove's.
New suns beam from every droplet of the shattering waves
from every crystal of the shattered rock.
Drenched in the mud, pure white rejoiced from this collision
where new colors born.
And in their slithering passage to the sea the shrugged up
riches of deep darkness sang.
[APPLAUSE]