Summary

In “Once in a While I Gave Up,” the speaker addresses the tension between the desire for forgetting and remembering. As in the earlier poem “Not Going to Him,” the poem describes a lapse in the speaker’s self-control as she surrenders to visceral memories of her husband’s physical form: “[I] let myself / remember how much I’d liked the way my ex’s hips were set” (43). The poem continues on to investigate the subjectivity of memory with celestial imagery, evoking dreams of her husband’s body as “the illusion of a constellation / visible only from a certain vantage” (43). She begins to physically render the “curve of that posterior” with her right hand, returning to themes of fragmentation from the self as she describes her hand as autonomous as it traces his absent form. This also suggests her residual erotic fascination, perhaps...