I cry at movies, especially if it's a movie that deals with any part of the mother-son relationship. It's just true. My wife finds it touching and ridiculous at the same time, because it comes across almost like a reflexive trigger. Like a Pavlovian experiment that maybe I should have grown out of by now.
It's no surprise to me, then, that I have such a strong response to Tim Bowling's poem, "The Last Days of Summer Before the First Frost." At its core, it's about a boy finding his mother after getting lost at a music festival. And how did he find her? "I followed my heart, he shrugs / so matter-of-fact" Which is, of course, perfectly touching. I suppose this should be sufficient occasion and sentiment for a poem to be successful.
But it isn't. Well, I'll rephrase that. Plenty of poems are written where some event like this drives the poem. I understand. Events like this help us to define life--the inexplicable value we find in life and frankness and parenthood and poems and most definitely epiphanies. I admire poems that probe into life. I admire poems that make that inexplicability even more inexplicable. And that is why I recommend Bowling's poem.
It introduces threat in the form of a wolf's throat, or deer-blink and salmon-kick along the avenue, or a spider threading its microphone into a blackberry bush. In fact, the density of these bizarre images at the beginning makes me disoriented, and I think this may be intentionally mimetic of what it's like for a child to be lost. But the poem turns. And the turn is into this very sentimental moment with the mother and her boy. And when the boy says he followed his heart to find her, I can't help but connect it to that spider that was threading its microphone down into the blackberry bush. Maybe this makes sense, comparing two instinctual impulses. Maybe it's simply inexplicable. But it touches something in me that maybe makes that mother-son relationship seem a little more sensible.
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