Neighbors, Throwing Knives

By David Bottoms b. 1949 David Bottoms

In the woods at the corner of our yards

we hang the plywood squares,

the Magic Marker images of pronghorn, panther,

grizzly, whitetail,

and step off the paces we use to measure

our skill.

Here in the soft light filtering

through needles and cones, green shifting

membrane of poplar, hickory, live oak,

white skin of dogwood beginning

to flower, we heft the blades,

grind points on stone, gauge the fine balance

between what is real and what is imagined,

the knives bringing all the animals to life

and killing them again

as our throws bury steel deep in the heart

of the quivering wood and the blades tremble

back through their bones.

In our own hearts

we love what they might be, their shapes

frozen in brush as though, suddenly,

they had turned from wood

and caught our scent drifting in a wind-shift.

So we hunt this suburb, whet our aim

to move among them in the little wilderness

beyond the bricked-in beds of azaleas,

sunflowers tied against tall sticks,

the half-acres of razored grass,

trellised vines, boxwoods manicured by wives.

David Bottoms, “Neighbors, Throwing Knives” from Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems. Copyright © 1995 by David Bottoms. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P. O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

Source: Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 1995)

Biography

David Bottoms was born in Canton, Georgia in 1949. He earned an MA from the University of West Georgia and a PhD from Florida State University. In 1979, Bottoms won the prestigious Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for his collection Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump. Robert Penn Warren, the contest’s judge, described Bottoms as “a strong poet, and much of his strength emerges from the fact that he is . . .

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