A Spoon

[Brownlie]

Hello, this is the first poem I'm posting here. I'm not fragile, so have at it. I've been working on it for the past two nights.

You seem to have left some pretty good comments so I hope you stick around.

A Spoon


A hand grabs a spoon from the drawer—an act so inconspicuous the brain commands it without notice. -- There is some redundancy here with the term inconspicuous and the idea of being commanded by the brain "without notice." You might want to consider playing with the word hand as well. Though it seems like your highlighting a dislocated aspect in of the body's parts a term that more indirectly alludes to the hand with a specific detail might work better. I think the phrase for what I'm talking about is metonym or something.


Two eyes busy their vision elsewhere. The hand knows well enough the what-to-do and the where-to-go of it: Two falls ago a map was committed to memory and burned with the leaves. -- You may also want to consider changing eyes as well. The hand doesn't know the brain sends signals based on imprints or something. You may also want to play with falls.

It is a spoon of considerable heft, unlike the flimsy tools that the hand has come to expect would come from this drawer in particular, which it must be said does maintain a sense of humility about itself, giving only what it was given. -- A lot of more abstract words that you may want to make more specific. Tools refers to a whole category of items that could be related in a more specific way to recount the speakers experience.

The brain awakens to its experience, the fingers probe at lines engraved in the handle, the eyes come along to see what is in the hand. --There is a lot of explaining of the concept, "The brain awakens to its experience." Can this be related without explicitly stating it?

And the signals connect, synapses spark in the brain—This spoon belongs to E____. -- More redundancy, I don't think you necessarily need "the signals connect and the synapses spark"

E____, you left this spoon in the sink one night. You left it, forgetting it then and forgetting it ever since. You left it, as a non-thing, unworthy of awareness or reflection. You left it, nihilated by your apathy. --Quotation marks?

Yet, the brain can no longer unfix itself. Not a spoon, E____’s spoon— . . . the elucidation of meaning.

A phone lights up and dances ecstatic off the edge of the coffee table.-- You may want to remove the word ecstatic.

I believe you have a cool concept here and a pretty good poem that you may want to tinker with. It seems that the themes of identity and memory would be made more powerful by making the poem more subtle and also making the experience more specific. Just my two cents. Hope that helps.