Spoons
I don’t know how long I’ve been planning spoon rebellion. Maybe it’s just come over me, thinking about you once again, and carefully drying all those spoons in the cool drawers in your house. I know it’s too late now, you’re gone. And yes, we’ve wept and drunk champagne and scattered your ashes in the ocean, but it does satisfy something even now, the idea of getting drunk and spoons rebelling. Spoons up in arms leaping out of drawers, spoons laughing and jumping up and down on your polished tabletops. O mother, what would you say? Spoons doing spoony tap-dances up the walls and over the ceiling like upside-down Fred Astaires.
But that’s the way it comes over me, and it makes me giggle, when I think about solemnly drying up your spoons and putting them away under the shadow of your clenched lip. Your silence, your busy busy busy behind me in the kitchen somewhere. The spoons we must use for your family-famous puddings, gooseberry fool, windy pud, the silver spoons we are meant to be grateful for inheriting. Here they are, in the frayed wooden drawer in the kitchen barn at the back of the old house. In the romantic south of France, where very un-romantically you have no money. And very impractically we have to travel all the way from England to even see you. And then we have to dry up those spoons so carefully.
But the wine is cheap, and it’s good to be here with you. Even like this, you busy washing up, clenched lip, thinking about your paintings and having no money and looking worried. Ok, so maybe I haven’t dried them up the way you wanted, and I think I will get drunk. And in the back of my mind, yes, spoon rebellion is well begun by now. I’m twenty-three, and I have no idea what I ‘m doing. The pressure’s on, and my tongue is about as articulate as spoons. As your own, as your own zone of silence behind me, busy busy busy, there you go. You flatten your tongue and I’ll flatten mine.
Anyway, for now I’ll just dry them up and put them away. Why not? After all, they’re only spoons, aren’t they. It’s no big deal. And we’ll do something different in a minute. Have a cup of coffee and talk about something jolly. Yes, that’ll be better. So there they are, spoons all put away now, lying in the cool shade, next to the knives.
Matt Black lives in Leamington Spa, and was Derbyshire Poet Laureate (2011-2013). He invented the world’s first Poetry Jukebox, and works in schools and at festivals. Website http://www.matt-black.co.uk/