The word "Divorce" appears only in the title. Inside the poem there is no spouse, no quarrel, no courtroom, only what the experience feels like. Nine of its seventeen lines begin with "Like," and each simile is a fresh attempt to describe something that won't hold still. The central idea is that this kind of loss can't be explained, only circled. The speaker keeps reaching for a new comparison because the last one wasn't enough.
The opening images are about emptiness. "Like hollowed earth, being" is an odd phrase, with "being" stranded at the end of the line. The speaker doesn't say "I am like hollowed earth." The self shrinks to a bare verb, something scooped out from the inside. "Like a broken instrument" follows, and it suggests a thing that once made music and now can't. Then the pattern breaks. Lines 3 to 6 are the only stretch without a simile, and they describe something the speaker actually does: "The visits and the revisits / To the same places / Same spaces / To fight memory." The repetition is the point. "Places" and "spaces" rhyme and almost mean the same thing, so the language walks in a small circle, just as the speaker does. There is also a paradox in "to fight memory." You go back to the very places that hold the past in order to beat it.
The middle of the poem turns to weather: "a mountain storm," "the night winds shivering," "December forever and ever." The images move from violent to cold to permanent. "Forever and ever" has the ring of a fairy-tale promise, and here it describes a season of winter, which makes the phrase sound bitter. "Rocks under a waterfall" adds the idea of being pounded without pause. After that the grammar starts to give way: "Blue birds and more / Always there, disappear / Stings." The lines contradict themselves (always there, yet disappearing), and "Stings" has no subject at all. Judging by the imagery, the bluebirds may stand for small pleasures that remain in the world and slip away, but the poem doesn't say. It lets the hurt arrive without a source, in a single-word line.
Then comes the most jarring comparison: "Like a pancreatitis attack." The word is clinical, a hospital word rather than a poetic one, and it breaks the lyrical mood on purpose. After the storms and winters, this simile insists that heartbreak is physical, something that doubles a body over. It's the bluntest line in the poem, and its awkward, many-syllabled sound makes it stick.
The ending changes the poem's music. For most of its length the poem is free verse, but now sound takes over: "a life gone wrong / Like a song about a gong / So long, so long." Wrong, song, gong and long chime together like a nursery rhyme. "A song about a gong" is close to silly, and that may be the effect. When the comparisons run out, the speaker slides into a chant. It could be a bitter joke, or a way of keeping the pain at arm's length. A gong also marks an ending, and "so long" works two ways: a farewell, and a way of saying how long something lasts. That second meaning echoes the earlier "forever and ever," so the goodbye and the endless winter end up in the same phrase.
The poem is worth reading because of what it leaves out. It doesn't tell the story of a marriage or hand out blame. It reproduces the aftermath through its form: the circling visits, the sentences that fall apart, and the shifts between nature, medicine and jingle, as if no single kind of language could be trusted to carry the feeling. By ending on a rhyme that is both childish and sad, it admits that comparison has limits. Even so, the list of similes captures what the experience is like better than an explanation would.