Motherhood, Loss, and Fragmentation Traumatic events reverberate. Thom Gunn’s poetry documents the emotional displacement of his mother’s suicide via bits and pieces of resurfacing memories. Loss is continuously recontextualized, and unlikely scenery—sexual partners, adopted sons—is invoked in order to touch on specific dimensions of his relationship with motherhood and the strange fruit it bears. By rooting through the wreckage of the tragedy’s aftershock, he shows how our relationship with trauma evolves alongside our ever-accumulating wealth of lived experience. Never fully receding from view, it instead takes on new life and fresh meaning in the bodies of others. Nowhere is this more prominent than “Touch.” Frankly, the poem isn’t about his mother, or anyone in particular for that matter; its focus is security, intimacy, and the ecstasy of feeling oneself openly welcoming (and literally falling into) the routine. Mothers—as a whole, not Gunn’s—make one fleeting appearance in the middle of the winding fourth stanza:
You turn and hold me tightly, do you know who
I am or am I your mother or the nearest human being to hold on to in a dreamed pogrom. In tight, nestled lines of three to eight syllables—sitting cozy on the page like a couple in bed—Gunn’s narrator gazes at his reposing lover and questions …show more content…
Certainly, the flea’s seamless melding of bodily fluids cannot be considered “a sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead” (6). Again, the flea is a vehicle for lessening his partner’s fears, but here, the text/sibilance tension is on even fuller display. The relevant words—“sin” and “shame”—are no longer euphemistic but instead entirely in opposition to sexuality; in fact, their very presence seems to intuitively mitigate a sexual presence. Nonetheless, the dueling hisses tie even this carefully reasoned challenged to chastity to a more physical