Friday, November 30, 2007

Honor

It felt like a privilege to sit in on last night's event, "Philip Levine 80th Birthday Tribute." Several of his fellow NYU faculty members/friends read favorite PL poems, adding their own personal remarks on the feisty old scribe. There was something from a former student (or was he a colleague?) of Levine's, and I do not quote: 'When you weren't sure of yourself, Philip was, and he convinced you.' Endorsement. There was another comment about how after reading a Levine poem (I was unfamiliar before last night), you go out and you look at the world differently. May sound generic, but isn't this the best/most that a writer can hope for?

Philip himself got up at the end and read a few poems (including the one below, which I can't read, and re-read, w/o shivering), and his personal remarks, bouncing between poignant (heartfelt thanks to all), crass (reference to a long-time favorite expression of his recently called into question by his students: "ratfuck"), and hilarious (addressing the featured writers/readers: "enough w/ the bullshit lines"; his encouragement of code words in relationships, one of his sweet wife's being "interesting" in response to some self-declared "piece of crap" poem), contributed even more weight.


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 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.

Posted by princess kanomanom @ 11:30 AM