The speaker addresses a lover who is both the cause of their ruin and the only person they can imagine choosing. From the first lines, love and damage are tangled together: the lover is "the mess" around something fragile, and the speaker lies "shattered" yet on "glorious" grass, as if being broken is somehow beautiful.
The middle of the poem leans into discomfort. The speaker admits to a shared "horror," a burnt skin, a punishing sun. Still they say they "endure," and even love the "filth" of the lover's sin, which they call the better part of the lover's bruises. That is an unsettling claim, and it suggests devotion that has slipped into acceptance of hurt.
The closing couplet pulls the images together. Pieces of the speaker are swept away by others, but never the lover, who stays fixed in their mind. The mood is intense, bruised and obsessive, with a strange tenderness running through the pain.