An untitled poem, marked only by three asterisks, begins at its brightest point and spends the rest of its lines falling away from it. A speaker addresses someone who has gone ("Now youre gone") and tries to say what is left once the person is absent. The central idea is that loss feels like the breakdown of the physical world, with everything sand, glass and wind, until the poem's last lines insist that one small human link survives: the flower in a lover's hair, tied to the speaker's heart.
The opening is strange and deliberately unstable. "For an instant, flat space lied behind your eyes" is a puzzling sentence. "Lied" may be a slip for "lay," but as written it suggests deception, as if the depth the speaker saw in those eyes was a trick of the light. Then comes the flame that "glared in its own face," a light looking back at itself, and the phrase "pure illumination." The moment is dazzling but empty and self-enclosed, and it lasts only "an instant." The word "flat" matters later, because the poem keeps describing the beloved as something two-dimensional. By the end she survives as an "image" arriving "in slow frames," like film played so slowly that each still can be seen. Memory here is a projection on a screen, and the "blank space streaked with silver" of line six reads like that screen, or perhaps like moonlight or tears. The imagery is open enough to allow any of these.
After the short, blunt question "What have I left to pledge my love to?", the poem turns to images of erasure. "Soft sand lines washed out at the sea" suggests marks, perhaps even handwriting, that the tide will not keep. The glass ball "on a fine string of wire" is more delicate still, and it "would scatter to the elements from which it started." Glass is made from sand, so the two images are secretly one: the speaker is imagining a return to raw material, a self coming undone. Even the verb in "abandon myself of the earth" is slightly off, as though the grammar were losing its grip along with the speaker. "Gyres and circling cones" add vertigo, a whirling that pulls the speaker upward and outward.
The form fits this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. Line lengths swing from the long, drifting "would scatter to the elements from which it started" to the flat drops of "Now youre gone" and "I fall lower." Those short lines work like missed steps on a staircase. The sounds also change with the mood. The soft, hissing "Soft sand lines washed out at the sea" gives way to the clogged consonants of "Everything grinding to its halt," where the rhythm seems to jam on its own words. The repeated words, "space," "heart" and "sun," do the work rhyme would normally do, tying distant lines together.
The ending turns on that repetition. "My heart would flow away and melt in the sun" completes the dissolving pattern, with the heart joining the sand and glass as something that melts. Then the next line catches it: "The flower in your hair is tied to my heart." A soft, particular object holds the speaker in place against all the cosmic pulling. The final line shifts from "sun" to "suns" and makes a bold claim: "Your fingers reach longer than the suns." The poem began with a brief, cold light, and it closes by putting touch above light. Her fingers outreach even the sun's rays, which are so often pictured as fingers themselves. Whatever has vanished, the speaker's feeling of being reached for has not.
The poem is worth reading for that movement from the vast to the intimate. Grief is often described in huge terms, and the poem uses them, with elements, gyres and suns. It then argues that the smallest detail, a flower, is the thing strong enough to hold. It also shows how free verse can make a reader feel a fall through line length alone. Some of its phrasing is rough or ambiguous, and the "lied" of the first line is a good example. That roughness suits a poem about things coming loose, and it leaves the reader room to decide what was real in that first instant of light.