A Spoon

[kindofahippy]

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.

A Spoon

A hand grabs a spoon from the drawer—an act so inconspicuous the brain commands it without notice.

The poem opens with a descending hand, though it seems that it's moving by some alien force without being noticed by the owner, like the owner was never thinking, "gee, i need a spoon". The hyphenation in the middle is merely an out-of-place conjunction where enjambment to a new line could serve equally well. Replacing it with a colon after drawer would lend drama and reduce the length of the line; as mentioned, it reads like prose otherwise, though quality prose.

Two eyes busy their vision elsewhere. The hand knows well enough the what-to-do and the

This is a subjective matter and determined by personal preference, but many writers have found that poetry is the art of taking a subject and stripping it down to what needs to be said, with just a little splash of color. Many of the poems i've read that are regarded as classics are bare bones, while this is more like a plate of ribs. It does not need to be said that both eyes look somewhere else, though one eye looking away would be fascinating.

where-to-go of it: Two falls ago a map was committed to memory and burned with the leaves.

Knowing what to do is all that has to be said; "where-to-go" is redundant and doesn't add anything, except perhaps a desire on the reader's part to glance over this section, and miss the beauty of the metaphor in the last part. The metaphor does falter, though. Saying the map was commited and then burned lends this goofy idea of drawing a map on paper of how to find the spoon in the silverware drawer, commiting it to memory, and then burning it in a leaf pile. That could be a neat reading, but if it's not intended, perhaps it would be better to say that a "mental map was burned with the leaves two falls ago".

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.

I agree with the above, this first sentence is too verbose. "considerable" is an abstraction that can mean anything, and it muddles the image of a good quality spoon that's in with cheap ones. "tools" is an abstraction better served by the narrower "utensils" or "silverware". "In particular" simply doesn't have to be said; it's inferred from the previous.

I'd like to see a new line with the new idea of a humble drawer. Perhaps, "It must be said, the drawer was quite humble; he gave only what was given". Further, this is stinginess, and not humility.

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.

This line is a fine example of being descriptive without being verbose or repetitive. It gives a passing respect to the neural and sensory experience of grabbing something strange.

And the signals connect, synapses spark in the brain—This spoon belongs to E____.

The dash is better served by a colon. "and" may be lowercase here. Is E_____ supposed to represent an almost-forgotten name, and is the burned map supposed to represent failing memory? If so, it is understandable, but if it's just to censor a name, then using a replacement common name would work fine without forcing the reader away from the story to think about that.

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.

That's a dramatic way to tell someone to put the damn spoon in the dishwasher. The abstraction of this line serves as an end to the poem, since it breaks up the imagery and replaces it with the novel thought of how ordinary things, like placing a spoon in the sink, don't get reflection but instead get treated to apathy. It is the dulling effect of the vagaries of diurnal routine.

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.

The hyphen doesn't work here, and the elipsis by itself is fine. The last part needs to be inverted. Reading it sounds like E's spoon is the elucidation of all meaning, where in truth the fact that it is E's spoon, of all people, makes the meaning of the spoon elucidated.

I love the last line for its ambiguity. I like to think it could refer to an ex whom the spoon belonged to, though it can have plenty of other meanings. A great cliff-hanger.

As for meter, it is blank-verse, and most of the lines are iambic with the occasional spondee. I enjoyed your poem overall, and I would like to read more poetry like this. I believe it is the surrealist genre, finding meaning in the simple.