Suzanne Keen

one poem

The spoon stays lost

The spoon stays lost, somewhere
in its wrapping, Mary Chilton pattern,
a gift from son to mother, possibly slid
under the heavy sofa.
The spoon stays lost.
Stir, stir, unstir.
The silver chest yearns and grumbles.

You cannot shift the stone slab
atop the stone box in the Burying Ground.
People bring stones to weight the lid of the Winslows.
You cannot unstir the years.
Fourteen generations thank the fifteenth
for turning away from the site
of the old bones’ capture.

The jelly spoon stays missing.
Made when just three hundred years
had passed since the Pilgrims’ landing,
it lasted to four hundred. Sterling,
pewter, books, their handling, their
handing down, the mouthful
of grease and ash: to hell with filial piety.

Time licks the concave
clean of its jelly, imagine currant jelly
for the red life of it. Unspoon.
Mary Chilton hops to shore on Cape Cod.
A shudder runs through native generations.
Something drops from her pocket.
The silver chest wants and wants,

but the spoon stays lost.

Suzanne Keen's poems have appeared in Agni, The Chelsea Review, The Ohio Review, and Quarterly West, among others, and in a collection, Milk Glass Mermaid (Lewis-Clark Press). Her literary scholarship theorizes narrative empathy. In 1987 Seamus Heaney selected her poems for an Academy of American Poets Prize. She serves as Dean of Faculty at Hamilton College, where she is a member of the Literature and Creative Writing Department.