08-02-2013, 07:32 PM
Dear Dark Blue, I really enjoyed your poem and the melancholic atmosphere it evokes, I understood it to be trials within a marriage, perhaps caused by the arrival of a son. The wife and son sit in the back of the RV, separate from the father/ husband character. I felt the appearance of the malevolent squirrel heralding the deterioration of the relationship and the accompanying rust imagery leant itself particularly well to your theme. Was the bowl sequence also referring to the shift in the marriage- designed to never tip, and then a baby comes along to test its strength? As your various images were so clear and evocative; the toothpaste, the bowl, the cross-stitched words, I was left wishing the time-line was made clearer, and the significance of the 7 year old boy within it, is it because this is when the relationship between his parents ended, when all lost their heads? Good luck, I look forward to reading more of your work.