Owning Your Old Knives

On Owning Your Old Knives

Sufferer, how can you help me,

if I use your sickness

to increase my own?

Will we always be

one up, the other down,

one hitting bottom, the other

flying through the trees--

seesaw inseperables?

                                                Robert Lowell

                                                Seesaw

After you died I don’t know why but my father

put some of your wood-handled knives

in a paper bag and gave them to me when I came home.

Of course some had cut clean

through how couldn’t they and I laid them

to rest on the floor of the back seat

on the passengers side so if for some reason

I was stopped and rammed full speed

from behind the last thing I’d’ve wanted was to be

stabbed in the back by them.  I didn’t need

that scar too.  They were dull anyway

and some of the handles were coming loose most

were unbalanced and not at all designed for real

tomatoes or real bread.  Still, when I got home

it seemed my duty to sharpen them for you

even though you didn’t need them not where you went

or were going and of course  you couldn’t hold

the one favorite of yours (I could tell it lived a different

life than the rest through its pock and singe

pimple-burns in its wooden skin and the right side

only as though it slept or not slept but rested

on its left as though having that blade out (you were

right handed)you’d be ready but I don’t know what for

or was it you really did remember

being attacked or something in you did

and you felt more steady in yourself after

those weeks in the hospital in the nursing

home healing you drying you

out a temporary cure for the fug in your brain

that was lifting when you were alone at home

in your own chair and we’d all gone back

to our own children and our own lives.  While the outside

bruises were gone and the spleen too (where

and because you said you didn’t remember nothing else

could be done other than to take it out) they kicked you

over and over and over the way I’ve watched

cane cutters take hold of the thick stalk

and wack one two its down one two its down

and sometimes when nobody’s looking and because

the old wives say its so they lick their blade

for the sweet iron and close their eyes feeling

the strength return on their tongue

first their thumb the blade-end guard protecting

the lips from everything from It all. 

These blades

and that one in particular with the little singes

were yours until you stopped needing them.   They laid

in the drawer for three or four years.  Of course

they slid as easily into their paper sheath  as they did

into any belly you pretended was a perpetrator:

a tomato puckering under the weight until you adjusted

where you gripped your fist on the wood

a carrot root losing its head easy enough to heat you

with false confidence.  They were dull as August

mornings never rising above the fog as crumpled paper

lunch bags a peculiar food.  None of this stops me

from sharpening them every one and hide them

in the basement on the top of an old medicine

cabinet and I pass by them every day like I always did

when you held them when I was young and cut me

cane that I was a whole plantation one stalk

at a time.