Today's poem is Knives and Lemon and Salt by Anthony Dolan Scott. It is read by Julia Bouwsma.
Knives and Lemons and Salt
The thing about people with knives
is all the slashing, sometimes to the face, often the back.
What if we traded knives for lemons?
Would we crave tarts, not violence? Do hands hold power
over tongues? Would it transform us into hounds
who salivate not for blood, but for tang and salt?
My father hid in heat waves, over-working, craving the salt
of sweat. He ran from words like knives,
yearned for his boyhood days chasing hounds.
Now he, like the terrified deer, with mom at his back.
Her with the acidic power
of questions, cutting like the lemon-
scented cleaner she held in her hand. Lemons
was all he saw in her, and salt
was all she saw in him, both holding power
to burn where the word-knives
cut. Even though we moved back
to his boyhood home, the deer hounds
never ran again. Chainsaws, coyotes, but no hounds,
filled the trees. Her lemon
colored duster filled the house, flitting from one side and back,
seeking order in lieu of answers, scrubbing away his salt,
putting everything in order, linens and lamps, forks and knives.
She polished us and the house into a tidy testament to her power,
the power to make out of nothing, the power
to craft house and kids and silence, and to hound
him and his muddied boots, oiled wrenches, blooded gut knives.
It was she who told me of the power of lemons
to take the stench of fish from cutting boards, to scour with salt,
returning the marbled grain of wood back
to its pre-Him beauty. I think back
on all this now, the hidden power
of knives and lemons and salt.
Like baying from lost pines, it hounds
her still. She hears it in silent afternoons, slicing lemons
or tomatoes in her lonely kitchen with the same old knives,
clutching the Bakelite handles…back and forth…sawing those knives,
pinching the damn salt, listening for dead hounds,
her power spent now on nothing but lemons.