"Their Old Knives"
For the livers and lasagna, the tomatoes planted
in broken concrete backyard plots in spring,
when Havana's tropicals and flamingo heat
migrated toward our own city summer,
for Jersey beans loving 9th Street's market sun
where women frowned and men sold glory,
and August's soggy long summer skies boomed
and purpled before rain fell on our heads
like an end of time, for artichoke points and plums,
for watermelon hissing back at this blade
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 …
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
or breakfast crust, then lunchtime's cold cuts,
dinner's cutlets, scunions, beets, you knives
and silver dollars and unlikely crystal flutes …
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,
be ready for whatever waits in half-dark now,
for telltale chance, or fatal cherishing.
.
W.S. Di Piero's most recent book of poems is Chinese Apples. He lives in San Francisco.
For Slate's poetry submission guidelines, click spacerhereyeshyperlinkPoetry SubmissionsSlate reads new poems from Oct. 1 to April 30. Manuscripts sent between May 1 and Sept. 30 will not be considered.To submit poems: Send, as a single attached document, up to three poems of no more than 50 lines each to editors@slatepoems.com. Use the poet's name for the subject line of the e-mail and for the title of the attachment. We prefer Word documents (.doc or .docx) to PDFs.Please include a brief, professional cover letter, including publication history, in the body of your email. Please limit submissions to one per poet per annual reading period. Simultaneous submissions are OK. Slate no longer accepts poetry submissions by mail. The email address editors@slatepoems.com is for poetry submissions only (or to notify editors of acceptance elsewhere of a poem under consideration at Slate). Other inquiries, etc., will not be addressed.10000false220061444537PMWednesdayJanJanuary161/4/2006 9:45:37 PM63271989937000000020061444537PMWednesdayJanJanuary161/4/2006 9:45:37 PM632719899370000000.Clickhere to visit Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project site.Click here for an archive of discussions about poems with Robert Pinsky in "the Fray," Slate's reader forum.