Black earth beneath the morning, black as sin and twice as deep, Where every seed goes down alone and every buried promise sleeps. I put the iron to your shoulder, felt the darkness rise and breathe, And something in the weight of you put something underneath. The screen was pale before me, a thin line against the night, It said I carried too much sky, a few small cents too high. So I lowered into silence, where the hidden measures run, And found the oldest kind of truth is never written down. A few cents high, a few cents low, How much of what we measure do we ever truly know? A little above the line, a little beneath the skin, There are places men enter once and spend their lives within. A few cents high, a few cents low, The hand forgets the number, but the earth remembers so. And somewhere underneath it all, where neither light nor prayer can go, The thing we thought we buried knows the thing we did not know. I laid the dark length underneath, beneath the road and rain, Where water keeps its counsel and returns without a name. The earth received the iron with a silence almost tender, Then folded round the hollow like a hand around an ember. I gave her weight, she gave me way, I gave her time, she gave me depth, And every inch became a kind of oath I had not meant to make. There are no witnesses beneath the ground, no saints below the wheel, Only the pressure and the dark, and what the dark reveals. A few cents high, a few cents low, How much of what we measure do we ever truly know? A little above the line, a little beneath the skin, There are places men enter once and spend their lives within. A few cents high, a few cents low, The hand forgets the number, but the earth remembers so. And somewhere underneath it all, where neither light nor prayer can go, The thing we thought we buried knows the thing we did not know. Forty-six winters in these hands, though winter never asks permission, Each one leaving some small mark upon the ledger of omission. I have carried what was given me, and carried what was not, And learned that every empty place is haunted by the thing it lost. The raven on the distant wire had no concern for grade, No knowledge of the careful line, no debt that must be paid. It watched the black earth open, watched the iron disappear, Then spread its wings above the road as though it had been waiting there. And I thought perhaps the bird knew why the deepest things are sealed, Why a wound beneath the surface is sometimes better healed. Why a man may spend his whole life trying to name what cannot speak, Then find the answer waiting underneath the place he chose to seek. The line was there. The line was gone. The earth was dark. The night went on. And somewhere between what I had measured and what I had meant, I found myself a few small cents above the place where I was sent. A few cents high, a few cents low, How much of what we measure do we ever truly know? A little above the line, a little beneath the skin, There are places men enter once and spend their lives within. A few cents high, a few cents low, There is mercy in the distance and a madness in the close. For what is buried under labor, what is buried under years, May rise without a warning when the black earth disappears.
