the knife

by Aodán McCardle

The knife has been with me since my earliest days, it is memory, it is anchor, it is this knife or another knife but always this knife. It was the first to taste my blood maybe but it anchors memory there in a cool interior dark with an outside hovering. Outside is light, outside is someone to call for help and she is locked now in another darkness and I can only hope that she is as locked in memory as she seems because the alternative clarity is a hell unbounded by the biblical. But then, the knife, the blood, the memory anchor, and her out there in the light so that even with sharpness and pain I was not alone, not as in some sense I am now alone from her at least and that aloneness is enough to touch everywhere at once, to make death no fearful thing for surely as light is light and dark is dark there are worse things than death.

            I retreat

The knife, this knife, this knife of knives

Brown, wooden handle, with brass ferrules, smooth this blade bladeness, thick enough, long enough, but with teeth, rounded teeth, rolling teeth like waves of waves like time rolling through the years. I’ve drawn and painted that rhythm, neither too sharp nor really blunt, as relative as any other determinant, this knife I misused on myself and here 50 years later, I carry the mark, writing at a café table with sun too hot and too bright through a big window the knife the shape in my eye in my head the patina a haptic quality of its returning gaze, conduit to another possibility that safety is as relative as sharpness. If it is a location, a possibility of location, then it is always there and if it is there then even this darkness, this aloneness

Safety is yet possibility

a dynamic in waiting

the knife that cuts

yet both anchor and lodestone

pointing the way but holding fast

if it was

then it can be

then it is

the knife

right now I am using it to cut at these dark hooked castings, waving it wildly, its energy as virile as its blade, a shield as much as a weapon, up close to the eyes, white metal and wood, asking immediate questions of steel and carbon

            how

can it be one and the other

a different molecular rhythm

of sameness

and me

we are one

earth and fire and flesh

adrift

in chance operations, always fighting for and against, particles of singular truth, now and now I’m stirring my tea, in a mug, with a too big spoon, a dessert spoon, I used it to eat my apple tart, they took the teaspoon earlier, I’m lodged here, limpetlike, filtering, and just now, stirring, this tinkling spoon, a cowbell, gathering thoughts, like a goat herd I spoke to once, in the mountains on an Island, in Greece, and we spoke of place, and we spoke of time, and we spoke of the sea, and swimming, and the day passed around us, tinkling and clunking and bleating, and we made the language we needed from what we had, hands and eyes, and north and south and east and west and he, he remains with me, as a balm against all fears, returning now, in my hour, through sound, and when I lift the spoon, and look in it, one way I am the right way up and the other way I am upside down

as it ever was

as it ever was

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