Today, September 15, is the fourth anniversary of my mother’s death. This time of year, I am particularly cognizant of items around the house that remind me of her.

A few days ago, I was cleaning out a kitchen cabinet drawer and came across a rod of carborundum (silicon carbide) that my mother brought to my household when she moved in with me ten years before she died. I remember as a child watching one of my parents taking our knives and pulling their blades across the carborundum to sharpen them. They used to take that action very seriously, reminding my brother and me that the sharpener must use the proper angle and pressure to ensure an effective cutting edge without grinding away too much of the blade.

When my mother cleared out her own household, she saved the knife and carborundum – assuming, I guess, that her daughter had no such treasured utensils – and brought both to my kitchen. I laughed when I first saw the knife because its blade was only half as wide as it had been in my childhood. But whenever my mother cooked, she used that knife, sharp as ever.

When my mother died, I threw out the knife, which I had never used, but saved the carborundum, a nod to her Depression-era thriftiness. I never used it, and now that I have re-discovered it, I cannot think of anyone, even Goodwill or the Salvation Army, who would want it.

But before I get around to discarding the carborundum, I want to thank W S DiPiero for his lovely poem remembering and praising the knives his Italian family used when he was growing up in New Jersey.

I like how DiPiero uses the traditional form of a three-part ode. As in a classic ode, he adddresses the knives directly, describing first, in an extended prepositional phrase, the various foods the knives were used for in the past. That grammatical structure slows down the reader and results in a stately, elevated style well-suited to something so integral to his family’s life.

After mentioning that he has saved and re-sharpened the knives, DiPiero turns from the past to the present and focuses on how he will use the knives. One can’t help but notice how diminished the knives’ usefulness will be – a midnight snack, a “breakfast crust, then lunchtime’s cold cuts, / dinner’s cutlets.”

The third part of DiPiero’s ode returns to high seriousness as he meditates on the uses of knives other than cutting food. His family “flashed you like batons / at their enemy, themselves, before or after food.” And he concludes with an ominous nod to his own future colored by the heritage of his volatile family – “be ready,” he tells the knives, “for whatever waits in the half-dark now, / for telltale chance, or fatal cherishing.”

I usually post a poem here on each anniversary of my mother’s death, but that is unnecessary this year. This poem will do just fine.

hi MA,

legacies do linger ... the important ones - which the material ones can come to symbolize ... I too have such physical legacies - seeing on the kitchen counter as I write here the wooden knife-set holder from probably about the 1940s of my mom's that I still have, as well as some of the knives and, somewhere too the sharpener (we never called it a carborundum) that, in my household, it was always my dad's task to use and sharpen with. That and barbecuing and making pancakes were the three male kitchen tasks I witnessed growing up. Kind of funny mix. I was never instructed in how to use a carborundum and, indeed, i leave that task to my husband. Legacies. My non-feminist underpinnings?

Wishing you peace on a day inherently full of memories ... A little over a month ago marked seven years for me and it was the first year that the whole day didn't feel like it had something of an undertow pulling me back in time operating most of the day ...

z

Addressing this here even though it's more of a p.s. to my post to bottomfish in his (?) thread ... but it connects also to your ode comments ...

I think the pronoun choices are suggestive of more than has been explored here yet: In opting to make the knives second-person direct addresses, from the title onward, his parents are third-personized. Typically, those who you make into third persons as overhearers or non-present parties (in this case, of course, fittingly accentuating that they are departed), I think it adds to the mixed sense of feeling I get from the poem about the author's emotional heritage from his parents. Direct address ("you") implies the hearer is being engaged more personally than those in third-person - I get the sense that the knives are less of a mystery to the narrator than his parents were, that he understands them and is 'bonded' to them even in a more straightforward manner than with his parents. Or at least I think the pronoun positioning allows for that possibility ...

-- also with ominous overtones:

LIGHTNING BUGS by W S DiPiero

The boy on my street whose flashlight
jacked last night across my face
shows me charred pebbles in a jar,
his mother hollering Jo-Jo,
where you? Time to eat.

The same cooled
simmering sparks
I once made into zinc gems
greening on my fingers
while their little glows faded,

evening dark coming down
and a purple storm ended
in women's voices yelling
Come home now or else.
I knew they wouldn't last,

those weakened souls
that came back every summer
from wherever else they go,
who visit now, in my window —
flash, a sensor house-light's

weegee when I pass,
or high beams chipping the rain,
our cinders in a jar, while stars
still burn above, just as bright
when they're already dead.

Maybe it’s just me, but today’s poem seems to have a lot of the letter T going on. I’m glad this poem showed up for you, MaryAnn. I enjoyed it as well.

Weegee’s a new one on me: <link>

Is that what he is referencing in the lightening bug poem?

HAP, I think weegee is slang for a Ouija board.

The sensor house-light can detect someone the way a Ouija board detects the presence of a ghost. And I think DiPiero calls the flashing lightning bugs or “weakened souls” (relatives) “a sensor house-light’s / weegee when I pass.

Two poems by DiPiero posted in Slate in 2002 --

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MaryAnn: HAP, I think weegee is slang for a Ouija board.

I thought that too, but:

Di Piero writes about both the literary and the visual arts in Shooting the Works: On Poetry and Pictures, a collection of memoirs, essays, notes, and art criticism covering a wide range of topics, from Hopi Indian storytelling to the poetry of Ezra Pound to contemporary photography.

I don’t know…

Seems that DiPiero writes most about childhood nostalgia. Ironing shirts in the basement with his mother, hotheaded Italians brandishing knives as they talk with their hands around the dinner table (that's not a cliche), fireflies in a jar (twice!; once as "charred pebbles in a jar" then, not to pass on reusing a cliche, "cinders in a jar"). Almost all with language as dead as the phrase "house of the dead" (who refers to their childhood home as the "house of the dead" outside of, perhaps, a bad horror movie?). That all of this seems to take place in my hometown of Philadelphia does not make it any more interesting.

But I see how this would have its sentimental appeal.

Sincere condolences to all who have lost loved ones and are reminded of them and their loss by this poem.

But, as you astute critics know well, that evocation does not a fine poem make.

With a little more language as vibrant as the watermelon "hissing" at the knife that cut it, this might have been a fine poem.

Interesting language in poem:

tomatoes planted
in broken concrete backyard plots in spring

This reads like filler:

when Havana's tropicals and flamingo heat
migrated toward our own city summer,
for Jersey beans loving 9th Street's market sun

Could you be more vague?:

where women frowned and men sold glory,

Interesting interchange of alliteration (s and g) to suggest the "sog":

and August's soggy long summer skies

But that good vibration is lost with:

boomed
and purpled before rain fell on our heads
like an end of time,

"Like an end of time"? Really? (How is that not any worse than "rain fell on our heads/ like armageddon"?)

Now first hints of the listing to list begin:

for artichoke points and plums,
for watermelon hissing back at this blade [More of this please!]
that once turned its other cheek to day-old
brick-oven bread, your fine uneven edges
faintly silvered once I diamond-steel
their grinded, used-up years of rust and gray …

[Yawn.]

Be ready for my needs, to do the work you know,
to answer hunger at odd times like these,
around midnight, or six hours later, the cantaloupe

As if that last line weren't enough, and now the full pointless list (more filler):

or breakfast crust, then lunchtime's cold cuts,
dinner's cutlets, scunions, beets, you knives
and silver dollars and unlikely crystal flutes …

Please, tell us what else you took from the house. We're dying to know. As it might be more interesting than this list of foodstuffs.

the precious few things,

[Argh! Denied!]

except for their lives,
that I saved from the house of the dead,

This phase would be laughable were it not in a published poem. Note to beginning workshoppers: never show up with a poem with any permutation of the phrase "house of the dead" in it and not expect to be giggled at.

where they argued, flashed you like batons
at their enemy, themselves, before or after food,
be ready for whatever waits in half-dark now,
for telltale chance, or fatal cherishing.

So I get that the knives represent a mixed inheritance: "precious things" that are also weapons. Symbolic of family strife, yada yada. But how is that any different from anything else inherited? As symbols the knives are rather...dull.

P.S. To anyone impressed that this is all a single sentence, that is easy to do when loading it with list filler like turkey stuffing to fill in the hole in its innards. For a truly impressive single sentence, reread "The Silken Tent" by Robert Frost (a rhymed sonnet in a single sentence).

Kiddo, you're just too young to appreciate the nostalgic list of foods. Besides, if this is written in the form of an ode, don't they also have lots of details?

I think the knives were more than symbols of family strife. See last two lines, esp. word "now."

Hi Cutter. Hope things are going well for you.

MA

I hate to be so ignorant but how do you sharpen your knives?

we are like knifes you know, sharped up as we go, our stone is scraped across the steel, the way we think and what we feel.

This is a cutting edge live poetry performance Powder, seriously…

I hate to be so ignorant but how do you sharpen your knives?

Hi Mr. River,

Carborundum or silicon carbide is a natural-occuring compound that has great uses as an abrasive. Machines ultilizing silicon carbide polish diamonds, and even sandpaper has a layer of silicon carbide. It's also sold (or was) in the form of a rod of about 12 - 14 inches that homeowners can use to sharpen their knives by scraping a knife's edge against the rod. It's exactly as you describe --

our stone is scraped across the steel

or, our steel is scraped across the stone (of silicon carbide).

How do digging machines get sharpened??

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