Hardly any image in "Forgetful" stays solid for long, and that is the point. Blood dries, sand trickles, droplets skitter, and at the end a whole colour turns into water you can drown in. The poem is about memory as something that cannot be held. It leaves marks on us, runs out of us, and finally dissolves into a feeling with no story attached.
It begins mid-thought. "More than the dried blood / Of healing wounds / To faded scars" sets up a comparison that never says what it is more than, as if the sentence has already lost its beginning. What survives is "A map of memories / Across the skin." A map shows where you have been without explaining why, and that is how scars work too: the body keeps the record when the mind lets go. The stranded line "To remember me by" then turns the scar into a keepsake, something left for someone else. The speaker seems to want to be remembered, yet the title points the other way, towards a speaker who forgets. The poem never settles who is who, and that uncertainty is part of its unease.
The second section brings in the hourglass. "The trickling sand / Is fickle in my hand" is one of the few moments of true rhyme in an otherwise unrhymed poem, and the neat click of *sand* and *hand* feels like a trap closing. The sand is "Like solid tears," a phrase that contradicts itself in the way grief often does. "A moment of roughness" is the grit of passing time, the one physical sensation in the passage. Then the scale jumps. The hourglass becomes "This wide funnel / A blackhole," and the next line, set apart in white space, widens "my hand" into "All of us drained away." One person's slipping memory becomes everyone's.
The liquid imagery keeps shifting state. Sand becomes "Beads and droplets / Skittering on slanted floors," and the soft, hissing *s* sounds of "skittering" and "slanted" make the movement audible. Because the floors slant, everything rolls the same way, and the beads end up "Chasing nothingness / Through the void." The speaker then pleads: "Tell me more," "Remind me..." The ellipsis is the only one in the poem, and the request trails off as if the speaker has forgotten what they were asking. The stories on offer are "Something new, / Something old / But always borrowed." This echoes the old wedding rhyme about something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue. The poem rearranges the list and holds back the blue until the very end. Borrowed tales suit a forgetful speaker who has to rely on other people's versions of the past, which arrive as "Snippets of scenes / Static and blurred." *Static* is a good word here, meaning both unmoving and like interference on a screen.
The last stanza opens in a sing-song voice, "Forget-me-nots are blue," which recalls the nursery-rhyme pattern of "violets are blue." The line carries an irony. It names a flower whose name is a command not to forget, in a poem called "Forgetful." Then the word *Blue* falls down the page four times, and the layout acts out the sinking it describes. The voice shifts to "you" and softens into an invitation: "Swim into it / And drown." The long vowels of *blue*, *you* and *into* make it sound almost like a lullaby. By now memory has shrunk from a map of the whole skin, to blurred scenes, to a single colour, "the depths of hues / You seek in your sleep."
The poem is significant because it enacts forgetting instead of only describing it. Its free verse has no regular metre, and its short lines drip like the sand. Sentences break off, pronouns drift from *me* to *us* to *you*, and the images thin out as the poem goes on. The ending refuses to say whether this loss is a tragedy or a relief. Drowning in blue sounds frightening, but the poem makes it sound like rest, and that mix of comfort and dread is what stays with the reader.