Two months, two memories and a note left on a counter: that is all amone gives us, and it turns out to be enough. The speaker addresses a former partner with a question that is really a reproach, "do you remember", and then lays out the evidence. Nothing in the poem says who these two people are. We know only what the speaker lets slip: a lonely November, a sweater, an argument in early December, and a goodbye delivered on paper instead of aloud. The central idea is that love often ends not in a grand scene but among small, ordinary objects, and that memory clings to those objects long after the reasons have blurred.
The opening is almost a song. "Remember" rhymes with "November" and then, in the second round, with "December", so each "do you remember" is answered by a month, like a refrain. The lines are short and lilt along ("that LONE-ly no-VEM-ber"), and even the next pair, "sweater" and "colour", end on the same soft sound in many accents. That tune suits nostalgia, since memories feel smooth when we return to them. The content, though, is sadder than the music. November is "lonely", an adjective that belongs to the speaker rather than the month, and because the fight only comes in December, the loneliness seems to arrive before the break-up does. That is an inference, but the poem invites it. The sweater is the one tender object. It is "your" sweater yet "in my favorite colour", so two people are folded into a single garment. The colour is never named, which keeps it private, a detail only the pair of them would need.
The grammar is odd in a revealing way. November is a time, yet the poem says "Where I had your sweater", as if months were rooms the speaker could walk back into. The same word returns for the quarrel: "where you and I / had a fight." Memory here is a place the speaker cannot stop revisiting. There are no question marks either, so each "do you remember" hangs in the air with no answer expected.
Then the music breaks. After "December" the rhymes stop and the lines turn blunt. The fight itself gets three flat words, "had a fight". We never hear what was said, as if the speaker refuses to replay the argument and cares only about its aftermath. "And it all came crumbling down" is a well-worn phrase, but it works almost literally here: the sentence runs on without a pause, and the neat sound pattern falls apart with the relationship. Next comes "left that note", where "left" does double duty, since the other person both left a note and simply left. The note sits "on the counter", the everyday place for keys and shopping, so the end of love is set down among the mundane. "Saying" alone on its own line is the poem's only real drum-roll, a held breath before the blow.
The final quotation is the cleverest moment. "love it's over" has no comma, so it can be read two ways: as an endearment, "Love, it's over", where the writer still uses a pet name while ending things, or as a flat announcement that love itself is finished. Both readings hurt, and the poem refuses to choose. The last word also carries the same soft -er ending as remember, November, December, sweater, colour and counter, so the poem's quiet music is closed off by the very word that closes the relationship.
What makes it worth reading is its restraint. The language is plain, even a little worn, and the speaker neither explains nor rages, only lines up a sweater, a fight and a piece of paper and lets the reader feel their weight. It is also a neat lesson in how form can act out feeling: the rhyme is sweet while the memory is warm and gives out just as the love does. And because the poem ends without any reply, the speaker seems to be still standing in that December, asking a question the other person may never answer.