Nine short lines, and the most important word in them is held back until the very end. The poem is about a tiny accident: on a train home, a speaker feels something lodged between two teeth, crushes it, and is flooded with the memory of a meal. The title, "Caraway," is the answer to a riddle the poem sets up in its first line. Its central idea is that memory does not always come when we call it. Sometimes it arrives through the body, through taste and touch, and it can turn an ordinary morning into something final only in hindsight.
The opening is flat and plain on purpose. "Halfway home on the train" gives us a commuter in a blank, in-between moment, neither where he was nor where he is going. Then comes an odd grammatical choice: "my tongue discovers something hard." The speaker does not notice or feel anything. His tongue acts on its own, like a small animal exploring. The object is simply "something hard," unnamed, so we know no more than he does. The line break after "left over from" is a nice small hesitation. The phrase hangs open before "a rushed breakfast" arrives, and "left over" quietly takes on a second meaning. A seed is a leftover, and so, we later suspect, is the feeling that comes with it.
The details of that breakfast are deliberately unglamorous: a diner, Brooklyn, a rush. Nothing marks it as special, which is the point. The poem suggests that nobody knows at the time which meals will turn out to be the last. When the molars "break it open," the verb is slightly violent, as if memory had to be cracked out of its shell. The next line speeds up with the casual ampersand, and then slows at the colon: "& the tongue remembers: rye toast." Again the tongue, not the mind, does the remembering. The colon works like a door opening. What comes through is not a face or a conversation but a flavor, the sharp, faintly bitter taste of rye bread and its seeds.
Then the poem drops into its two shortest lines. "Our last meal together." is the only place the poem admits anyone else was there. Everything before it is "my" and "the," and the single word "Our" makes the speaker's solitude on the train suddenly audible. The word "last" carries all the weight, and the speaker never says how he feels. The poem also never says why the meal was the last. Judging by the text, it could be a death, a breakup, or a move away, and the reader is left to feel that gap. The final fragment, "Caraway seed.", names the culprit and ends on two stressed syllables, a full stop with nothing after it. Having followed the speaker's tongue, we now share its recognition, with no commentary to cushion it.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The poem is free verse that moves like a thought, with long, loose lines at the start and clipped ones at the end. Its sound is quietly controlled, though. "My," "molars," "remembers," and "meal" share a soft, humming m, a mouth-sound that suits a poem about chewing and recalling. The harder consonants of "hard," "break," and "caraway seed" crack at the right moments. The image of the seed also does double duty. It is hard, small, and stubbornly lodged, like a grief that has not yet been dealt with, and only when it is broken does its flavor, and its meaning, come out. A seed is also something that can grow, though that reading is only an inference, and the poem does not push it.
What makes "Caraway" worth reading is its restraint. It recalls the idea, famously explored in Proust's madeleine episode, that taste can pull a whole past out of hiding. But where Proust expands, this poem shrinks everything to a few seconds and a handful of plain words. It trusts a crumb of bread to do what a speech about loss could not. Most of us have had a smell or a song ambush us in this way, and the poem catches that moment exactly, as the tongue finds the seed and the mind understands it.