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.