Beyond the edge - Poem

Beyond the Edge

   I'm drawn to the moment on a blade when steel
   fades out of self and into nothing, on a line
   fine enough to defy even the gentlest touch.

   There were seven chisels in my father's toolbox
   laid top and tail about like sardines
   (or packed on their sides like bottles of wine)
   yet each one different suited and ground
   to its own purpose and buffed
   to a misty mirror-finish on the fiat.

   Unused for years they speak of when
   preparation seemed all there was to do
   and as important as the job itself
   in the fight against encroaching dullness
   with hands that shook on those clouded blades.
   This was to be his last anthology of sharpness.

   Each chisel was taken to the limit
   honed on a strap and then laid by
   keen to make even the dullest timber
   flower--some other day perhaps.
   I took them home and use them now
   --and now and then I sharpen one. Thinking

   nothing cuts forever. Thinking
   of a molecular discrimination so refined
   that you would feel nothing should the finger
   slip to bone--beyond surprise
   at how the blood has come to marry oil
   on the cold black stone below.

   So we work to carve shape from sense
   trembling in the confusion of the wild woods
   out there--where my father went to live
   altogether away from sharp edges.
   With a toolbox ready for every single thing
   but that which came to pass.

Roderick Watson is Professor of English Studies and Head of the Department at the University of Stirling and is also Director of the Stirling Centre for Scottish Studies. His poetry has appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, and he has published a book of verse, True History on the Walls. He has published extensively on modern Scottish literature and is editor of the essential anthology, The Poetry of Scotland: Gaelic, Scots and English. Watson also has been General Editor of the Canongate Classics series since it was established in 1987.

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