PARTISAN REVIEW
417
KNIVES
Around us hangs a curtain like rain. Around us, spirits of
salt waiting for our griefs to release us. We cannot touch the curtain.
It hangs in front of the days and the nights, the sun and the earth.
It wears us away but we believe we would be nothing without it.
Or
if
not nothing, then naked. Our spirits scarcely speak. Could they
pass through the curtain without us? Have we no others? We look
out and see nothing, through the curtain, but uses.
We look at the knives, those gentle creatures, many of them
older than we are. We see only the service we ask of them - separa–
tion, separation, and pain. Without which, as we say, we would be
nothing. So we never see those meek faces themselves, moving in a
world upon which they open no eyes at all, about which they know
nothing, and of whose savageries they have become a
symbol.
They
who eat nothing, who do not even defend themselves against the
dew, against rust, against any of the bearers of loss, and who make
no sound, except an occasional clear note like the calling of a bird,
when they have been struck, or abraded with a stone. They who
will
obey any guide.
Through the curtain we look at them shining quietly on the
wall and we are nudged by a vision of a bloody shore.
