Someone has gone, and the speaker is left reeling. The poem opens on a brief, dazzling moment, an "instant" when the loved one's eyes seemed to hold a flame, "pure illumination." Then comes the blunt line "Now youre gone," and everything drains into emptiness: "Blank space streaked with silver."
From there the speaker feels themselves sinking. The imagery turns fragile and unstable: sand lines washed away by the sea, a glass ball on a thin wire that could scatter back into its elements. Spinning "gyres and circling cones" pull at the speaker, tempting them to let go of the earth altogether. Time slows, and the lost person's image arrives "in slow frames," like a memory played back frame by frame.
The ending returns to tenderness. The flower in the loved one's hair is still "tied" to the speaker's heart, and their fingers seem to reach farther than the sun. The mood is dreamy, aching, and a little dizzy, a love that lingers even as everything dissolves.