How Many Spoonsful

for Tracy

The heritage of spoon life is selfless. Pinch of control. Drops of gratitude.
Recipes lost, recreated. Sugar bowl broken. But hold the filigree
between three fingers as witness to the low places rubbed tenderly

with repeated use. Middles revealing favorite

spoon. Not straw. Not knife. Not pencil. Hollow shaped to baby’s early palate.
Cupped hand feeding heart and medicine. Nest.

Morsels. Head on straight. Body tapering to obligation, to waist and silver flare
of hand picked dress. Necklace fleur de lis and necessary scoop of chicken soup.
Teaspoon of anxious soothed with thick, sticky honey.

History of food fights settle in this slingshot. Instrument and measure, these utensils

we pull from the shadowy bottom drawer. Patient is this tea bag rest after hours upright working. This spoon and all its forever conversation is yours now.

Spooning up a brand new decade. Old things and shiny replacements. Song in spoon. Dance tune. Still life of plant with seed pods resembling silver dollars, the timeless silhouette of your mother’s hair.

Comments

Open Mic, Cafe Babar

I remember arriving, not the prettiest but appealing to certain bards in the back room, entering through the Castro Valley corner door, walking the postage stamp sized Cinzano bar curated by a man from Detroit who named his establishment after a certain French elephant in a children’s book I arrive with budding consciousness around politically correct solidarity for disheveled neighbors, entering the cigarette lit night rising to tin siding ceiling to floor thumping insistence Bruce and Joie and David and Laura and John, their ash and sweat accumulating as I waited patiently for my place on the crumpled sign-up sheet Today, three decades later, I sit in a Santa Fe gallery named simply Here, and a poet reads to us of roadrunners and a bear and a continuation of the call for preservation of our environment There is an otherworldly hum outside the window of leaded glass The owner sidles up behind me and pushes the fr...

Grit and Sunlight

What springs up: insistence in this persistent mother of mine (still breathing) Even busy ashes from a rescued urn float up reconstituted as morning dew She unfolds her tendril arms from shadow (shaking just five days ago as if in temporary surrender) (that moment when I am less certain of her longevity) this woman ever present (anyone’s mother) aging when even the most spindly clover of her fragile skin captures the sunrise light like anticipation’s shower ...

Protozoa

When we spoke on the phone there were dominant background sounds, crickets here that rhymed with the smoke alarm that went off in your living room and you couldn’t remember the code to shut it down and last night a moment of rain and I lay in bed unsure if I should go outside to set the orange bucket aside from the downpour to maintain the safe house there for the unidentified protozoa, my husband called them, naiant in the unlikely habitat - what I believe tadpoles beside a yard where I have never seen frogs but perhaps it is the sludge cry that I seek the sticky tar paper that lines my lungs and heart cavity weeping impending displacements, my father who may never button up his favorite green shirt again with philodendron etched on fabric nor walk out to the lanai at the back of his house with his third wife and we either joke or pretend we will take him to the beach when we ...

As Mourning Doves Persist

Search This Blog