{"id":2248,"date":"2025-06-16T19:42:07","date_gmt":"2025-06-16T23:42:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.catherinewhite.com\/roughideas\/?p=2248"},"modified":"2025-06-16T19:42:07","modified_gmt":"2025-06-16T23:42:07","slug":"16-summer-shards-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.catherinewhite.com\/roughideas\/2025\/06\/16\/16-summer-shards-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"#16 summer shards 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Simple Truth<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

I bought a dollar and a half’s worth of small red potatoes, \u2028took them home, boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt. \u2028
Then I walked through the dried fields \u2028
on the edge of town. In middle June the light \u2028
hung on in the dark furrows at my feet, \u2028
and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds \u2028
were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers \u2028
squawking back and forth, the finches still darting \u2028
into the dusty light. The woman who sold me
\u2028the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone \u2028
out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater
and sunglasses
praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables \u2028
at the road-side stand and urging me to taste \u2028
even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way, \u2028
she swore, from New Jersey. “Eat, eat” she said,
\u2028”Even if you don’t I’ll say you did.” \u2028
Some things \u2028
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
\u2028they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme, \u2028
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker, \u2028
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering \u2028
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves. \u2028
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965 \u2028
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
\u2028and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
\u2028what I’m saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch \u2028
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
\u2028it stays in the back of your throat like a truth \u2028
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
\u2028it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken, \u2028
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
\u2028in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.

\u2014Philip Levine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rough-ideas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.catherinewhite.com\/roughideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.catherinewhite.com\/roughideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.catherinewhite.com\/roughideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.catherinewhite.com\/roughideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.catherinewhite.com\/roughideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2248"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.catherinewhite.com\/roughideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2250,"href":"https:\/\/www.catherinewhite.com\/roughideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2248\/revisions\/2250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.catherinewhite.com\/roughideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.catherinewhite.com\/roughideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.catherinewhite.com\/roughideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}