Potato Boiled in Water with Salt and Pepper

I am still not beyond the thing-word or noun	
     —Günter Eich


'You move from the familiar to the unfamiliar.  You use what you know as a tool for trying to better 
understand what you don't know.'  He paused again.  'At the most basic level, right now, since we've just 
met, I'm using myself as a metaphor for you.'
     —Albert Gore, interviewed in "The New Yorker," July 31, 2000

1.  POTATO

The potato was first cultivated more than 6,000 years ago in the Andes Mountains, at elevations 
above 10,000 feet, in what is now known as Peru and Bolivia.  The Quechua people, descendants 
of the Inca, have more than one thousand names for potatoes.

We point at the moon with one finger.  
It goes about its business.  We jab; it feints
in slo-mo.  I did it my way, sings the moon, 
in its best cracked cabaret voice.  
The light takes a long time 
to make its way there and back.

Potatoes are tubers propagated by means of dormant buds called eyes.  An excellent source of 
vitamin C and potassium, potatoes also provide B vitamins, fiber, copper, magnesium, and iron.

Or maybe time, time buttons its herringbone vest,
arranges its watch-fob, deals.  Maybe time
palms every face-card, and memory, yes,
memory slips them back in the deck later, 
or no, instead replaces the snapshots in your albums
with kings and queens.  This childhood you say you had,
goes memory.  Can it be proved?  These could be anyone.

Europeans did not initially accept potatoes. Some were troubled because potatoes were not 
mentioned in the Bible, while others attributed common diseases to potatoes.  Potatoes first 
became popular when Marie Antoinette paraded in France wearing a crown of potato blossoms.

The Phoenicians crossed the East River in their swift black ships.
In the cargo holds, they carried the names of vitamins.
The ship capsized just off the coast of Williamsburg.
Most letters were lost in the dark water. 

Empire State, Chrysler, World Trade Center, say the Andean tourists.  
Your city is full of mountains.


2.  PEPPER

Malabar, Alleppey, Tellicherry, Lampong. 
Muntok, Ceylon, Sarawak, Brazilian.
And Columbus discovered America, 
and we cracked America, and ground it coarse, 
and paid our ransoms, and dusted our meat.


3.   SALT

The square is an expression of two dimensions: a surface.  Everything that exists must do so in 
space and in time; however, time is not one of the two dimensions of a surface.  So, does a 
surface exist?  An interior?  Is one being and the other nonbeing?

The square does not concern itself.  It means land, field, earth.  It points to these things.  It 
stands in, for example, for the earth, when the earth cannot itself appear.  In botany, the male.  
To the Egyptians, a stool of reed matting.  In war, private soldiers.  In weather, the ground.  
An asterisk in the square: ground covered with snow.  To the alchemists, salt.


4.  WATER

With the light it was easy: God called it, and it came,
it came along into being.  But our words
were all used, and fit improperly.  The world
entered its awkward stage and its edges poked through.

The colors of the ultraviolet would not even come out
to receive their names, nor would the sounds
way down at the spectrum's ends be heard.

Whatever we called a thing, that was its name.
But things weren't their names.  Everything kept right on 
being itself, as if the lights weren't even on, as if the water 
was mixed up with the water, and not neatly divided.

Eventually the world got sore and went off to sit by the fire
in a cave somewhere.  On the cave walls,
like a large and terrible monster:
language.
 
The face of the water was dark, and God's face
was also moving there on the face of the waters,
so that it seemed that the film of God was all over everything.
We didn't know which was the glass and which was the mirror.



I don't want to die, we said to God.
I'm resting, said God.
The thrush in its nest, that consonance, we said to God.
What?  said God.
Nothing.