Hi bf,

A very nice, well articulated parsing indeed...

I have a couple of additive comments and one smallish dispute, the latter being that I think this overstates how I read the poet's view of his childhood:

"It's clear that the poet cherishes the life of his childhood, including his parents."

Although "cherishing" is his culminating word, I get a much more pensive, mixed-feeling vibe about his view of his childhood... And "fatal cherishing" taps into some of that "double-edged sword"ness, if you will ... While, on a readily evoked level "fatal cherishing" would suggest loving that which kills you (livers? lunch meats? cutlets?) and killing that which/who you love ('crime of passion'), I think he evokes that final notion to capture much everyday-life kind of double-edged swordness in a way that leaves me feeling the weight of his legacy from his upbringing ...

A couple of other wordings, for me, contribute to this sense:

"unlikely crystal flutes" -- evocative oblique wording for what I take to me unused or unoccasioned champagne glasses - capturing a sense that there wasn't much impulse toward toasting/celebrating to be had in the everyday life where knives were ever-present and crystal flutes stayed on an upper shelf somewhere ... to be passed on to the next generation ...

I find this line particularly complexly intriguing - because of a somewhat unique use of the reflexive "themselves":

the precious few things, except for their lives,
that I saved from the house of the dead,
where they argued, flashed you like batons
at their enemy, themselves, before or after food,

Since it seems unlikely to me that the image he's conjuring up from presumed memory is one where his parents would have flashed knives like batons at their own self (although if they did it would suggest something even more daunting - although it happens in some families - parents threatening to kill themselves in frustration, typically more for emotional manipulation effects, not "seriously") ...

No, what I imagine here is that the poet instead means "themselves" in a way that evokes the notion of family systems theory of how reflexive a whole family 'unit' is ... More plausibly to me, mom flashed a knife at dad at times, and dad flashed one at mom - but "themselves" contributes a sense that they were really one ('enmeshed' if you will) unit where, from a child's point of view, it was - in the context of pre- and post-mealtime argument -- a kind of duel he grew up witnessing that was punctuated by instruments of violence flashed in the air to emphasize the passion ... It's a bit too stereotypical, but the author's last name being Italian would tempt one to imagine the infamous Italian-blooded passion of communication ... where the echoes of much emotionality are "diamond-steeled" into the knives he has inherited from them ...

And the fact that he leaves us with a present-time descriptor of "half-dark" suggests that he himself does not feel he has yet made sense of all that legacy ... that he only in glimpses catches sight of what to retain and what to shelve from that mixed legacy of how to do/be family...

btw, having lived in Manhattan one year of my life, I found the evocation of August weather there to be very rich - and i particularly like "purple" as a verb...