Poetry |

“Mother’s Knife,” “Kestrels” and “Beyond the Corner of Church & State”

Mother’s Knife

 

My brother & I took turns & I chose Mother’s knife.

I took a blue wedding portrait on porcelain of my

grandparents, by Grandmother.

 

Then a sienna portrait of my great grandfather by

my great aunt.

Then the knife, a kitchen knife with a plain wooden

handle, close grained, probably walnut.

 

With an up-curved tip, a canoe breasting waves of

cucumber & pepper.

A kitchen machete that takes an edge & is not

stainless.

 

Well sharpened, it glides through tomato, a prow

through calm water.

& it masters the white water of garlic.

 

 

Why did I want the knife & I did want the knife.

I calculated three rounds & it would have been safe

for several more.

 

I loved its heft, like a hammer, its dancer’s balance

&

its serious plainness of purpose, like a paddle.

My cooking is all sauté and stirfry, pasta or rice as

base & binder with much to cut up first on a

board.

 

Chicken or sausage then vegetables chosen for a

medley of taste, texture & color.

Which is not how Mother cooked,

Asian/Mediterranean lore no part of her

practice.

 

 

I had taken a class at a Y where a man was found

dead in his room.

Not hacked or diced but, as his friends insisted,

departed by astral projection.

 

He would be back, they said.

How, by some starship canoe?

What J-stroke would draw him in to what shore?

But I was downstairs learning to cook rice.

I don’t know how my parents came by that knife

during the Depression.

 

A guest called it a fish-filleting knife as he had

worked with in Alaska.

My parents honeymooned canoeing in Canada.

 

 

Dad liked to say about farming, that he could go

fishing whenever he liked.

About his big brother, “His idea of play is another

whole day’s work.”

 

Dad managed more play, but rarely to fish; neither

his wife nor brother much wanted to bother.

Mother cooked because one did when one was a

farmer’s wife.

 

It feels good in my hand & I’ve long wondered how

it felt in hers, alone in the kitchen, remembering

courtship & a canoe or, perhaps, dreaming a

pirouette before filleting us all with it.

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

Kestrels

 

In Perth, Scotland, our hostess urged us to take in the Show

a county fair with horses & baking & even a tent with six or

 

eight birds of prey, hawks, kites & owls & the sparrow-falcon

the kestrel, the windhover, slightly larger in Europe than here

 

in the Americas, a bird I have followed wherever I could for

over forty years, since one autumn on an island off Georgia

 

when I first saw them to know them, if I could ever know

a bird, though I learned enough to recognize its compact

 

tail-bobbing tipping on the power lines along the high

ways every ten miles or so through the winters of ten

 

to twenty years ago, then exploding into elegance

wings & tail flaring to hover over our grasslands

 

as they do, “brute beauty & valor & act, oh” & all

but lost now for all the reasons our kind has made

 

other kinds vanish so that more & more seeing the

kestrel is my prayer answered: there is no good day

 

without a kestrel in it, somewhere even if not where

I happen to be where they live on the verge of vanish-

 

ingly rare.  So to see one closer than ever before: A man

brings his birds to the Show & photographs me holding a

 

kestrel, an image I have set loose on the web where it may

soar — let it not prove so — beyond all the days of the kestrel.

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

Beyond the Corner of Church & State

 

We cross the street into the cemetery, cross the equinox

into autumn & turn uphill to a back section that has gone

 

to meadow, where I found bluebirds all summer, flitting

among trees & tombstones, some of both tilted or fallen

 

& the chipping sparrow with that modest dash of rufous

on his crown & with the sun a little farther south & the

 

meadow north of our path, it is easier to place it behind

you so the blue of the bird shines & doesn’t look sooty

 

as it will if the sun is not at your back.  If it is, the blue

bird’s blue is so brilliant it begs you to offer a likeness

 

as blue as Lake Superior seen from a canoe, as blue as

the Caribbean at the beach of Tulum, as blue as a post

 

card from Santorini where tile on the roof of a church

instructs the sea in its color, as blue as our hope for a

 

bird that Jimmy & I have come to see but fail to find

this morning, not that Jimmy cares rolling as he does

 

in the dew-wet grass that’s still as green as gumption.

 

Contributor
David Hamilton

David Hamilton’s A Certain Arc, a new collection of essays, is published by Ice Cube Press of North Liberty, Iowa. He is now retired from the English faculty of the University of Iowa where he taught medieval and modern poetry, and nonfiction writing, and edited The Iowa Review for many years.

 

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