Poetry Wednesday; Philip Levine, The simple Truth

The Simple Truth

Philip Levine
The Simple Truth was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1995

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Levine_%28poet%29

Levine grew up in industrial Detroit. The familial, social, and economic world of 20th century Detroit is one of the major subjects of his life's work. His portraits of working class Americans and his continuous examination of his Jewish immigrant inheritance (both based on real life and described through fictional characters) has left a monumental testimony of mid-20th century American life.

It can be best found in books such as "They Feed They Lion," the National Book Award-winning "What Work Is," "A Walk with Tom Jefferson," and in his "New Selected Poems." Growing up, Levine faced the anti-Semitism embodied by a local celebrity, the pro-Hitler radio priest Father Coughlin.

Art work by
Martin Johnson Heade 1864-1865

Hudson River School painter was born in 1819 in a rural community in Buck's Head County, Pennsylvania. His father, the owner of a successful farm and lumber mill, encouraged him to study art from a young age, and he received his first art lessons from local portrait painters Edward and Thomas Hicks. In time Heade's skillfulness and sophistication as an artist greatly increased, and he is now recognized as one of the greatest and most versatile American painters of his day.