The Simple Truth

by Philip Levine

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.

This poem is from Levine’s 1995 collection of poems with the same title. What I love about this poem is the “hinge” in the middle. On a first reading it seems like second stanza is the explanation for the first and the poem moves from a pure description of an experience to its deeper meaning. Reading over it again though, the two parts are very similar, describing even the same cooking and eating of potatoes. Still something changes. The deeper meaning of all these stories (the woman from Poland, Henri, the seasons, “the absence of light gathering / in the shadows of picture frames) is simple, yet inexpressible. I think I’ve turned to this poem again and again because it captures the strange complexity of living. We know things and we know others know things and we know others share those things what we know, but we never really know what those things are. The kindness of others, the melting butter, even our memories are real and important, but mysterious and unknown. We share so much, but still we don’t know each other and find ourselves asking somewhat nonsensical questions like “Can you taste / what I’m saying?”, hoping to get at something we can’t even describe. The simple truth isn’t simple, but still, it is.

(submitted by s. sharma)