Today’s poem is “Pocket Knife” by Bruce Willard. His poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Harvard Review, and Ploughshares, as well as on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac. He has two collections of poems: Holding Ground (2013) and Violent Blues (2016). A new book, Bond, will be published soon.
He writes, “‘Pocket Knife’ was written after my father’s passing a couple of years ago when I was reflecting on the legacy of making and unmaking that he passed to me. As I examined a pocket knife that he gave to me and that I carried for many years and thought of the different uses I put it to, I was moved by the way given objects become the extension of their givers and how nostalgia is often grounded by some yearning more elusive.”
Pocket Knife
by Bruce Willard
How it rode
closed, unopened
close to the sensitive
parts of me
more than 20
years. Passed
from my father
the promise
it might open
a letter or splice
a line or connect
a pair of speakers.
How the coppery arteries
bared of insulation
paired to terminals
might swell with sound
and fill the quiet rooms
of what could be
a home.
Poem copyright © 2018 Bruce Willard.