"My Mother, Heidegger, And Derrida" - Featuring Van Gogh's "The Potato Eaters"

Heidegger

Derrida

Potatoes
As kids we called them "spuds."
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/06/why-are-potatoes-called-spuds/ 

My Mother, Heidegger, And Derrida

Educated at a school in Queens
whose slim roster of celebrated alums

boasts Don Rickles number one,
my mother knew little about art,

but she took me to a show
where she withdrew into private air

on seeing “The Potato Eaters”
and “Three Pairs of Shoes”

because the shoes resembled my grandmother’s
high-topped boots my mother knelt before

and laced up every morning
after applying salve

to those diabetes-ulcerated shins.
And the potatoes recalled the fires

she and her brothers built
against the curb:

charred skin, raw at the center,
and called “mickeys” in honor of the Irish.

My mother pointed out how the poor
have only potatoes for dinner, their faces

so rough they looked unearthed themselves.
And the shoes, ravaged by labor. Unlike Heidegger,

who said of “Three Pairs of Shoes,”
“From the dark opening of the worn insides

the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth,”
and utterly unlike Derrida, whose note on that painting

questioned what “constitutes a pair of shoes and how
the elements of such combine different forms of reality,”

my mother said they show how hard some people work.

"My Mother, Heidegger, And Derrida" read aloud by the poet: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/24/my-mother-heidegger-and-derrida

• John Skoyles lives in Truro, Massachusetts. His most recent books are “Suddenly It’s Evening: Selected Poems” and “The Nut File.”
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The Potato Eaters: Down To Earth

An Analysis

https://artsubtext.com/2017/05/15/the-potato-eaters-down-to-earth/

The Potato Eaters

Van Gogh

1885

The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2003/jan/11/art

"Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the earth."