WHEN’S A FORK A SPOON
—from Rattle #34, Winter 2010
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Marianne Boruch: “This poem is part of a sequence, The Book of Hours, of what I think of as eerie and irreverent secular prayers, each written in early morning silence, coming from who-knows-where. They were gifts. And though a runcible spoon—a bit of nonsense first mentioned by Edward Lear in ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’—came to mean a weird multiple-use hand-held utensil at meals, it suggests in this piece exactly what, I’m not sure. But in the rush of the poem’s coming onto the page, the sweet singing ‘to a small guitar,’ the confusion of knife/fork/spoon and the way we feed and feed anyway those loved ones who are dying—all became a way of grief. Thus this poem. And thus poetry.”
