the sun and her flowers

The speaker leaves the reader in no doubt about how much pain she is in following the breakup of her relationship. The voice she adopts is direct, blunt, and ruthlessly honest. She is searching for a way to understand what has happened to her and carry on in spite of the heartbreak. The chapter begins with a poem titled “cemetery,” which although short stretches over four pages (13-16). The first lines encapsulate the situation the speaker finds herself in: “on the last day of love / my heart cracked inside my body” (13). The effects of the heartbreak are devastating. In one poem, which has the following first line, “i spend days in bed debilitated by loss” (18), the speaker weeps and mourns, and days pass by without distinction as she cycles through conflicting emotions of anger, hate, and forgiveness, and also times when she feels “okay” (18).

In order to sleep, she has to imagine that her lover is still there (“pretend” [20]), and in “the construction site of our future” (22), she thinks of what they could have built together had he stayed. This poem is notable because it consists of an extended metaphor which presents a relationship as a physical building that must be constructed with bulldozers and “planks of wood” (22). The poem ends on a sad note: The speaker asks whether flowers will bloom on the building site when both she and her lover have gone and are creating new relationships with someone else. This poem is immediately followed by “the first mornings without you” (23), in which the imagery, unlike in the previous poem, comes from the natural world. Personification, which is when something nonhuman receives human traits, takes place when the speaker hears the “hummingbirds outside / flirting with the flowers,” who in turn are “giggling” while the bees are “growing jealous” (23). Nature is thus animated in the speaker’s eye by behaviors that mimic human lovers as they court each other. Imagery of the natural world appears in the next poem, too, which is untitled and consists of only two lines: “i envy the winds / who still witness you” (25). These lines suggest the vast reach of the element of air, which can be aware of things that are at far remove from one small human observer.

The chapter contains much reflection about what went wrong in the relationship. In “addiction” (27), the speaker acknowledges how flawed the relationship was and that she tried many times to leave it without success. She also mentions for the first time that her ex-lover was abusive, but since she was addicted to the idea of him, she didn’t want the relationship to change or end.

The longest poem in the chapter, covering four pages, is “what love looks like” (30-33), which describes a session with the speaker’s therapist in which she explains she was wrong to think that love could be equated with a particular person; love, on the contrary, lies in one’s actions and choices: “love is knowing whom to choose” (33). Despite this breakthrough, the tone of lament returns when the speaker, in a two-line poem, uses the common literary trope of the lover as the sun, the light of life: “you took the sun with you / when you left” (35). In spite of the lover leaving, she still remained loyal to him, she says in “loyal” (36). Yet she can’t stop herself, in the very next, untitled poem, from taunting him, saying that love “is a double-edged knife” (37), and he will suffer just as he made her suffer.

In “the human condition” (39), she successfully stands back from her own situation and makes a wry observation about the confusing nature of romantic love: No one wants the one who wants them; instead, they want someone else, someone who does not want them in turn.

After taunting her ex-lover, the speaker quickly returns the focus to herself and her feelings. In the poem that begins “i wonder if i am” (40), she experiences self-doubt about her appearance; and in the poem that starts “show me a picture” (42), she expresses jealousy, wanting to see the face of the woman who has replaced her in the man’s affections. In “questions” (45-47), a long, three-page poem, she lists the questions she would like to ask her former lover but knows she never will. She also realizes, in “the person i fell in love with was a mirage” (50) the illusory nature of what she was involved in. The things she saw in the man and the relationship were not really there at all. This sounds the note that will be repeated throughout the book: the search for the truth beyond illusions. It seems also that from time to time the lover wanted to come back and just be friends with her, but she gave him a cold reception: “i don’t need more friends” (53), she titles one poem.

In spite of the deep, relentless pain that the poems in this chapter express, the chapter ends on a note of resolution and even hope. Time is always moving on, life continues to unfold, and she must “open the door to the rest of it” (“time” [55]).