O' Noblesse O' by Nikky Finney

O' Noblesse O'

{on the occasion of Martin Puryear’s Noblesse O’ (red cedar and

aluminum paint) at the Dallas Museum of Art}

Perfect for picking up marbles,

For finding, lifting, a favorite

Blade of grass, O’ magic elastic straw of the watering hole,

Perfected for sucking, water, up,

Then miraculously aiming back

Around, into the mouth, mod implement for trumpeting sound,

And underwater snorkeling,

And cracking the shell but never the peanut,

Graceful long-legged factory of olfaction, engineered for uprooting

Eight hundred pounds of tree trunk,

Like an arm, you were designed for touch,

Elongated curious proboscis, at the tip waits opposable fingers,

The nerve endings

Composed of the most sensitive tissue

Found in the world, evolutionary marvel, one alone,

Holding 150,000 fascicles,

All muscle, no bone, zero fat,

Only plush gray memory matter, inter-connected dorsal and ventral,

Laterals, transverse and radiating,

The interior of your snout

Arranged like the wheel of a bicycle, engineered to control

The larger movements in life,

Up and down, side to side, (Run! He has a gun!)

The most versatile appendage ever designed, given the delicate flexibility

Of something earth-rooted,

As well as something in flight,

Coordinated precise contractions, making complex coiling movements,

Reaching twenty-three feet

In the air, for food,

Wrestling with conspecifics, digging for water, raising mud beds,

Shoveling sand, wiping an eye,

Here rises all that is left of her,

Truncated assemblage of all her senses, beneath what you thankfully

Cannot see, is the rest of her severed body,

Her last big movement, simple;

To hoist her oil can of a nose as high in the air as inhumanly possible,

To warn her family,

Her trumpet calling out to her new calf

Nearby, humans on all sides, she will still be alive when he swings

His massive blade into her long thick snout,

As they, scurry away with her two front teeth,

Cassocked in their blood cloth, long prehensile double nostril writing

Tube, made of smart flesh and mother muscle,

Monarch and Luna moth tissue,

One hundred and forty pounds and 150,000 fascicles, each with a sense of

Smell 4x that of a bloodhound,

Here rises the trunk of the last elephant,

Who came as her mother came, to the watering hole, early in the day,

Before the heat & the humans,

To lower herself, to teach her calves, this is how to drink,

O’ Noblesse oblige, O’ Noblesse O.