I bought potatoes at the farmers market yesterday. Tangentially relevant to today’s poem, the woman who sold them to me farms in Warsaw, Virginia. The potatoes were so fresh it reminded me of my childhood summers when I was a young teenager and my parents rented a barn on the edge of a potato field in Long Island. Both my mom and dad had studio space and my brothers and I could walk to the beach or ride our bikes to see friends. I have great memories of walking along the edge of those fields. There were dirt bomb fights. We collected potato bugs and did stupid things with them. There were the potatoes one brother carved for an artist exhibition called “Food for Thought.” There was space among the potato plants to have my own private thoughts. We only had an outdoor shower and it looked out over the field. We often ate potatoes under the grape arbor. Actually, we ate all our meals under that grape arbor because it was the only place we all comfortably fit.

The Simple Truth

I bought a dollar and a half’s worth of small red potatoes, 
took them home, boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt. 

Then I walked through the dried fields 

on the edge of town. In middle June the light 

hung on in the dark furrows at my feet, 

and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds 

were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers 

squawking back and forth, the finches still darting 

into the dusty light. The woman who sold me

the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone 

out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater
and sunglasses
praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables 

at the road-side stand and urging me to taste 

even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way, 

she swore, from New Jersey. “Eat, eat” she said,

”Even if you don’t I’ll say you did.” 

Some things 

you know all your life. They are so simple and true

they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme, 

they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker, 

the glass of water, the absence of light gathering 

in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves. 

My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965 

before I went away, before he began to kill himself,

and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste

what I’m saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch 

of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,

it stays in the back of your throat like a truth 

you never uttered because the time was always wrong,

it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken, 

made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,

in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.

—Philip Levine