A married couple watches a new neighbor doing something odd: talking, in a gossipy way, to her six silver spoons. The speaker says "both my wife and I" saw it, which sounds like a man trying to prove he isn't imagining things. The spoons seem to stand in for people, or perhaps for a life she once had.
The fourth and fifth lines turn sharper. Her past arrives "hot / and strange as a whore," a startling simile that suggests the neighbor's history is scandalous, or at least that the speaker imagines it that way. The comparison tells us as much about his attitude as about her. He is curious and a little judgmental.
The final line, "the story is true," works like a nervous insistence. Nobody has questioned him, yet he defends it anyway, the way people do when passing on rumor. The mood is wry, nosy, and uneasy: a small-town whisper in six short lines, with the speaker caught gossiping about someone who gossips with spoons.