As a schoolchild I used to perform an exercise called "diagramming sentences." Given a sentence, my task was to draw a diagram showing the relation of subject and predicate, and within them, independent and dependent clauses. I still remember the divided horizontal line setting out the major parts, and clauseson diagonals running downward left to right. Nowadays a similar thing is done when a computer compiler or interpreter program reads a statement of a programming language like C and begins the task of converting it into "machine language" that the computer can actually perform. Now the task is commonly known as "parsing."
"Their Old Knives" is (very nearly) a single complex sentence. The narrator is addressing some old kitchen knives he apparently inherited from his parents' household. When he says
you, he means the knives. In line 15 he commands them:
Be ready for my needs, to do the work you know,The fourteen lines before this spell out the work the knives knew: cutting liver, tomatoes, watermelon, and day-old bread. The four dependent clauses beginning
for tell us what the knives cut. But the poet doen't stop with the cutting tasks; he tells us in an accumulation of what could be
called "sub-dependent clauses" where the tomatoes grew, what the environment of the garden was like, what the sultry days of August were like, until he has come close to evoking part of a way of life. The line "where women frowned and men sold glory," suggests that this was a violent neighborhood.
After
Be ready, the poet sets forth the tasks he wants the knives to do for him now: assist in midnight refrigerator raids and other meals. In another dependent clause he tells us that the knives are
the precious few things, except for their lives,
that I saved from the house of the dead.
It's clear that the poet cherishes the life of his childhood, including his parents. This is the motivation for the lines before the line beginning "Be ready for my needs." Not surprisingly, he thinks of his own life as being similar to theirs. For his parents, the knives were more than kitchen implements: the parents
...argued, flashed you like batons
at their enemy, themselves, before or after food,
which leads us to the inference that the family was troubled. The poet, like the parents, sees trouble ahead, and likewise asks the knives for protection. The last two lines are a single sentence by themselves, which gives them an appropriate importance:
be ready for whatever waits in half-dark now,
for telltale chance, or fatal cherishing.
It would be interesting to know just what is waiting in half-dark, but no clue is provided.
It's interesting to compare "Their Old Knives" with the previous week's poem by Hirshfield, who found great potency in a mere invitation in the mail. To a number of people (including me) this seemed a little strange. I supposed it had something to do with her experience with Zen. Here we
have another poem about objects, but it's more deeply rooted in ordinary human emotions. A child hangs around the house and becomes closely acquainted with even minor household objects like kitchen knives. When he's an adult and the parents are dead, he's attached to the objects as links to the past. He also inherits his parents' problems, which may explain why he sees them as weapons in the same way they did. Another poem by di Piero, titled "Smoke" can he found here:
<link>This shows the same fascination with the world of his childhood that is seen in "Their Old Knives", along with the same feeling that life is inherently a violent affair.
