A "Poor Spoon" story

Early in this blog I wrote a poem I called "Poor Spoon." It was a phrase about which I'd written something a few weeks earlier, but I didn't have the draft at hand.

I just found the earlier "Poor Spoon." It's marked "March 10, 2008, 3:46 a.m."

I pick you up from the corner
where you have fallen,
turn you over to check the mark
on your back.

How often I have searched for your kin
in the great cracked plastic bin
at Goodwill:
lifted it and spilled the clatter
of 10/18 and tin, now and again
something fishy-golden that is silver

Lady Charming is long gone,
bypassed by style after style, the migration
of manufacture,
crowded out by stamped tools with uncertain edges.
You could bleed from such a spoon.

You all smell of blood,
and you bleed gray,
and I don't know the test of your mettle.
I only want your handful of flowers
and your serene, smooth glow
delivering my soup.


There's a spoon in a corner in this one, but that's about it for similarities. This one is pretty true to personal experience, and in its unforcedness--except at the end, with the soup--I prefer it to the one I wrote for the blog, though I suspect most people would disagree.

I remember having this one in my head, getting out of bed, walking to my home office, fumbling for light and scrap paper, scribbling it down--I ran out of room at the end--and going back to bed, all in a very short time, a few minutes.

You know what I like about this one? The sound, the shape. I hear the spoon in this poem, and I see the spoon in the sound in this poem. (I don't think I truly have synesthesia, but I do tend that way.)