Look at the sun for too long and it follows you when you turn away: bright blotches that float wherever your eyes go. "Sunspots" borrows that small, slightly painful experience to describe what it is like when someone has left you without quite leaving. The poem is four lines long and a single sentence, and its central idea fits in that sentence. A person's intensity outlasts their presence, and what remains is not the person but an impression on the senses.
The poem begins in the body. The speaker's fingers "tremble under the heat of you," which makes the beloved a source of warmth, a sun, before the title's metaphor is fully spelled out. Then the senses start to tangle. We get "the scent of your touch," although touch has no scent. That blurring feels true to being overwhelmed, when one sensation spills into another. The poem also moves outward as it goes, from fingers to skin to hair and finally to "vision," ending on the sense we use to look at the sun. We never learn the beloved's face, name or words. They are known entirely by what they do to the speaker, as the sun is known by its glare.
The simile arrives late. "Like sunspots left on my vision" comes at the end of the longest line, after the title has already done half the work. The word is richer than it first looks. In the poem it means an afterimage, but "sunspots" also names the dark patches on the sun's surface, and the poem may lean on that second sense. Brightness and blemish arrive together. Loving something this dazzling carries a cost, since you cannot look straight at the sun without being marked. The trembling and shuddering in the first two lines are ambiguous in the same way, and desire and fear are both left open.
The form suits the subject. There is no end rhyme, and the only punctuation is one comma, so the sentence never quite stops, the way the feeling never quite stops. Line lengths swell from eleven syllables to twelve to fourteen as the image gathers, then pull back to eleven. Three present participles carry the sense of ongoing sensation: "Shuddering," "lingering," "Drifting." Two of them are placed to hang in the air. "Lingering" ends its line and spills over the break to "On my skin," so the word itself lingers. Sound does quiet work too. The soft s of "scent," "skin," "sunspots" and "vision" gives the middle of the poem a hushed, breathy quality, and the l of "lingering," "left" and "long" slows the reading. Even "you" frames the poem, closing the first line and appearing twice in the last. The beloved is the first thing named and the last thing lost.
That last line holds a small puzzle. "Drifting to me from you" does not say what is drifting. It could be the sunspots, the scent or the touch, and the grammar lets them merge into one haunting. There is also a quiet irony in the situation the simile describes. A sunspot in your vision is made by your own eye, not by the sun. The beloved supplies the light, but the lingering mark is produced by the speaker. If so, absence is not simply something done to the speaker. It is something the speaker's own perception keeps alive.
"Gone" arrives as the final word, after all the warmth, scent and glow. The poem makes the reader feel absence the way the speaker does, as something noticed only once the afterglow has begun to drift. The poem does not say whether the marks fade, and it does not say whether the speaker wants them to.
Nothing about the writer or the circumstances of writing is available beyond the username on the page, and the poem does not need it. Its significance lies in economy. It takes one ordinary physical phenomenon, the ghost left by something too bright to look at, and uses it to say something exact about desire, memory and loss in four lines. It also leaves a faint warning that the most vivid people may be the ones who leave the longest mark.