I bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes, <br />took them home, boiled them in their jackets <br />and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt. <br />Then I walked through the dried fields <br />on the edge of town. In middle June the light <br />hung on in the dark furrows at my feet, <br />and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds <br />were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers <br />squawking back and forth, the finches still darting <br />into the dusty light. The woman who sold me <br />the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone <br />out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses <br />praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables <br />at the road-side stand and urging me to taste <br />even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way, <br />she swore, from New Jersey. "Eat, eat" she said, <br />"Even if you don't I'll say you did." <br /> Some things <br />you know all your life. They are so simple and true <br />they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme, <br />they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker, <br />the glass of water, the absence of light gathering <br />in the shadows of picture frames, they must be <br />naked and alone, they must stand for themselves. <br />My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965 <br />before I went away, before he began to kill himself, <br />and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste <br />what I'm saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch <br />of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious, <br />it stays in the back of your throat like a truth <br />you never uttered because the time was always wrong, <br />it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken, <br />made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt, <br />in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.<br /><br />Philip Levine<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-simple-truth/
