Red Potatoes and Poet Laureate Phillip Levine

Preston Stanley

The news of United States Poet Laureate Phillip Levine's passing was on NPR Morning Edition yesterday. I came across this poem, that happened to be about red potatoes. It also just happens to be that last week was the Southern Rocky Mountain Agricultural Conference at which the Colorado Certified Potato Growers Association display of potato varieties that are marketing in the state, around the country, and around the world. Red potatoes, yellow potatoes, white potatoes, harlequin-skinned potatoes, purple potatoes, fingerling-shaped potatoes - the diversity expressed by these potatoes is remarkable; a credit to the Colorado State University potato research program that develops these for our industry partners.

The Simple Truth1

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.

Colorado Rose

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

Masquerade

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.”

Purple Majesty

   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.

Fortress Russet

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,

La Ratte

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.

A box of genetic diversity

___________________________

1 Posted at the Website for poets.com.