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 the middle of 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 betray our love. Can you taste
what I’m saying? It is onions and 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 in it.
(1994)
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