"The Simple Truth" by Philip Levine
Simple: 87; Easy: 0
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 the 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 from The Simple Truth (Knopf, 1993)
Some poems you know all your life, too, and this is another one of mine: I’d hazard these lines come back to me once a week, and I’ve given the collection that shares its title as a gift more than twice. I’ve always loved its disquiet, the discontent that strains beneath what is presented so—yes—simply as to seem easy. Like the light in the furrows and its absence gathering in picture frames, it accrues so slowly you can’t see it happening, even when you’re listening for it. How do we get from finches darting through the dusty light to a moment of profound sublimity, of a longing so acute it verges on bitterness? The minor note is established by shifts in speech act and in syntax: narrative—recent and distant past—and description yield to declaration and exhortation; poised compound sentences give way to breathless anaphora, to a driving rhythm underscored by a couple of startling shifts to varieties of second person.
The speaker begins the poem in the near past, laying out a narrative of self-possession and a luxurious variety of loneliness: a simple meal, something comforting prepared and served in a way you’d only serve it to yourself—and so by definition self-indulgent—followed by a walk where only someone who’s been there again and again would find interest.1 But this solitude, like all solitudes, is subject to the society of memory, in this case the recent memory of the woman who sold him his supper, who in turn led him back to the distant past, to the childhood peopled with aunties and neighbours who know what’s best for him.
The poem hinges exactly on the vegetable seller’s gentle hectoring, which comprises the entirety of line seventeen in a thirty-three line strophe: “Even if you don’t I’ll say you did.” It’s an odd moment, at first glance, but the great power of this bit of related dialogue is what it reveals about our speaker. After the confidence of his opening reportage, the glimpse into the interaction asks us to imagine the rest of their exchange, and with it we fill in his shyness and hesitation, his reluctance to yield to a simple desire and the proffered gift of pleasure, and the ways in which, however old he may be now, he is still the boy, no matter how far he’s come—knowing Levine’s biography, how far he’s come is the distance between Detroit and Fresno—who still has need of others, even if he’s not quite willing to admit it.
The poem swings into its second movement simply enough: after narrative, we shift into a lyric mode and a speaker outside of time, who addresses us in the lyric present with the (simple) assertion that there are some things so fundamental you will always know them. It’s the shortest sentence in the poem thus far, and also the first to address a second person who we are likely to understand as ourselves, as the reader, spoken to directly by the poet—though he may well also be talking to himself, distracting himself from the embodied memory with an abstraction, a generalization.
We (and the self-talking speaker) next receive instruction in how we should regard these verities. Our speaker has regained his equilibrium, and just as he strides confidently through the narrative details of the opening lines, here he marches us along through instruction in a complex sentence structured by anaphora:
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
We’re back now with the speaker in the memory of the opening lines, sitting at the table with our frugal repast, though the scene has acquired a new tone, an additional charge with the introduction of picture frames darkened by what is first curiously described as “the absence of light” and then as shadows. As far as simple truths go, description via negativa doesn’t really qualify. Too, the introduction of the frames is the implied introduction of the pictures they hold, themselves the introduction of their subjects—yet where detail describes the vegetable seller, her sunglasses and spangled sweater, whoever, or whatever, those pictures depict remain undisclosed.
Instead, the anaphora continues, and a third instance of “they must be” draws our attention back to the general meditation. Unlike the first two instances, which both begin endstopped pentameter lines, the third pushes up against an enjambed break, and it’s a virtuosic one: if you’d have predicted the words that begin the next line would be “naked and alone,” congratulations, you’ll absolutely be the most convincing witch this Halloween. After a nice glass of water and a shaker of salt, where has this come from, this image of vulnerability and abandonment? We’ll find out soon enough, but first we conclude this long sentence with the fourth repetition: “they must stand for themselves.” It’s not hard to see some self-talk going on here, the speaker’s instruction to the reader equally his instruction to himself: stand on your own, eat your potatoes, take a walk with some jays. Whatever you do, don’t let anyone get too close. Don’t eat the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way from Jersey.
There’s a second hinge—a door inside of a door—in this second set of sixteen lines, and it’s coming soon, after we’re brought back into a past narrative and the introduction of Henri, a friend from long ago—1965, to be precise; The Simple Truth was published in 1993—about whom we learn very little, except that the lessons the speaker is currently imparting were arrived at in his company. It’s not a lot to describe a relationship, except that, perhaps, it’s everything: my college roommate, a valued teacher, my best friend from graduate school—each of these people is a sort of living mnemonic for the things I came to understand with and through their companionship. Henri is one of these people. Or at least he was, before the speaker “went away,” and Henri “began to kill himself,” and both of them began “to betray [their] love.”
What has happened here? We’re not going to get details—but do we really need them when at last we are witnessing the lesson in real time, receiving the fundamental truth of the relationship—they loved each other—and its end—he left, Henri began to die, they betrayed one another—with absolutely no qualification or contextualizing, the things that really matter, in the end standing naked and alone. There’s nothing more to say, nothing more he can say about it that will change the facts of loss, longing, and regret, and so instead we get the next turn, another shift in speech act and a variety of second person that, grammatically, can’t be self-directed, given there’s a you and an I: “Can you taste / what I’m saying?” The assertion that was first offered with relative calm is now importuned; as the woman insists the speaker eat, he in turn insists we experience in our bodies the exact flavour of his longing and regret in all its vivid richness, and does so in another driving crescendo of repeating phrases and constructions:
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
It’s nearly rage, isn’t it, the way he hammers these assertions again and again, the combination of plosive and sibilant in “it is,” “it stays.” “Stay” is interesting all on its own here: that a bit of knowledge stays feels, at first blush, like a good thing: it endures. And yet I don’t have a lot of fond memories of things being stuck in the back of my throat, and there’s nothing but regret in the simile that follows, the memory of the thing you didn’t say only stays there the rest of your life because it’s too late.
Read this one out loud. Especially this one. If it’s not too late, go say the thing that needs saying, too.
Windsorites! I’m inaugurating the first meeting of a poetry book club at Biblioasis Bookshop this Wednesday, October 22, with stephanie roberts’s sophomore collection, UNMET. You can pick up the book at a little discount beforehand, or just come by (there will not be a quiz) and hear me insist that people read poems out loud in person.
As someone who entertains herself with dried fields on the regular, I’d be delighted! But I also know from experience that my personal haunts aren’t particularly engaging to the average guest.