It’s that time of year when I start fulminating, inwardly or out loud, about DFS ads and the Family Merrie Christmas Ideal as perpetuated therein. I don’t know why it’s DFS in particular that gets the sharp end of my tongue—everyone’s at it—but there’s just something about those cosily-jumpered families laughing and snuggling on their spanking new sofas which gets my goat. The latest iteration has caused me, as it does every year, to think about families, the different shapes happiness can take, and the difference between loneliness and solitude. I like the way this poem by Minnie Bruce Pratt explores that difference (among other things). Here is ‘The Sound of One Fork‘.
It’s the way the poem tells it like it is that I most like. There’s neither idealisation of experience, nor melodramatic complaining. Like the neighbour who ‘does not hurry… does not linger’, the poet finds a middle place from which to look at her experience as a whole. Stanza one gives us anticipation, quiet excitement, a sense of movement and nourishment (the ‘honeybee in the mouth of the purple lobelia’). Stanza three (unlike the DFS ad!) challenges assumption, with its calm, satisfying, satisfied sense of what ‘sufficiency… may’ feel like (and that ‘may’ is important: assumptions are not being made either way). Stanza four admits to the work there can be in ‘making each day’, acknowledges ‘desolation’ and ‘loneliness’. They are framed, though, not as causes of regret but rather the consequence of choices made and still believed in. There’s an awful lot of emotional work and wisdom in arriving at that place!
In the final stanza, it is with a quietly skilful touch that the speaker describes ‘get[ting] out the silverware’ as part of the act of ‘persist[ing]’. Perspective is switched here: suddenly it is the speaker whose life might be overheard by others; about whom assumptions might be made as to her loneliness. I love also the small sense of solace the speaker seems to get from a sense of adjacency: ‘we persist’. There is solace, too, in the communion with nature; and how the heron may leave unsatisfied for the moment, but will ‘come back’. That the poem closes on the light on her wing, the beauty in movement and change, seems entirely right. Nothing stays still. The wheel turns.
