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      August 1, 2023Marianne BoruchWhen’s a Fork a Spoon

      When’s a fork a spoon
      or a spoon a fork, little
      tines stinging out at the end?
      Weird and not right but
      handy, she insisted. And runcible,
      good, long-lived. The owl,
      the pussycat—you know that poem—
      out to sea in a beautiful boat
      by a small guitar, my love
      and the rest of it … But a spoon
      with those straightaway thorns. A fork
      flooding up to the brim. Next
      they’ll razor the edge and call it
      knife. What to cut then?
      Once a tongue and a mouth.
      And anything you gave it.

      from #34 - Winter 2010

      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.”

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