Section Three deals with the aftermath of separation. Nature and objects are rent. Memory of the other fades. In “Love Poem by Frank Gehry” (p. 51), there is “a beer can torn to shreds,” “And every ounce / of steel in a wall above the river can’t hold / the light of your eyes slowly turning to lead in memory.” Section Three deals with the aftermath of separation. Nature and objects are rent. Memory of the other fades. Mixed with the pain darkening recollections, there is bitterness in the remark, “I remember how your face has the pretty hope / of a scar beneath makeup.” The melodramatic last line, “How I loved you” is superfluous, but a reminder of how restraint can falter in disaster and thus adds to the recurring theme of human pathos.

In “A Friday at the End of August” (pp. 52-53), memories of singing migrant workers on the family farm fade as a ray of sunlight stabs “deep and wet in the blue-black Pacific,” the “cut” not preventing the thought of a swim. Similarly, in “As If” (p. 54), the anguish of the narrator’s seeing his former lover with someone new “across the street” who “took her hand,” does not stop him looking and in jealousy demanding, “Take it back.” But he can’t take her back; perhaps there will never be another to replace her. “[O]ur fathers”, in the poem of that name (p. 55), had “new wives that never took”: he might never again be close. In “Knowing You Were Loved,” (p. 56), he can only conceive of a new, future relationship in terms of self-deception: “How long / will I wait to start pretending again?” It has been three months after the separation, and he himself is divided, having experienced them as “three months outside my body.” Again, the figure of the little boy is present, “at the edge of the sea,” looking at the waves “with a longing so pure / … he’ll truly wish to die.” This recalls the birth of Venus, who is suddenly faced with the burden of having to live and survive. The narrator is barely alive, refusing integration and the consequent pain: “I will not reenter / my body.” He is present for his new lover: “there it is, my body, waiting”; even though he is “tired of lying,” of pretending.

The world seems ill. In “Phoebe at Daybreak” (p. 58), the suburbs are depressed, “too sad to know their own sweetness,” and the neighbour is “dull-eyed.” It is to the nightingale that the narrator offers his daughter, his “moon over the suburbs,” perhaps to deliver her from earth, where in “When Dean Left West Virginia” (p. 59) “[t]he rivers / [are] silting in like a fat man’s arteries.” In “Spring in Lincoln Park, 1910” (p. 60), an artist has instead painted late autumn clouds: “He has them wrong / for spring.” They nevertheless concur with the narrator’s mood, in which he projects mourning on to the artist, asking,

Further on, he wonders about his children’s perception of his mood: “Did my son / hear the fleck of Payne’s gray… in my voice over breakfast?” His depression might distance them. In “Isn’t That Enough” (p. 62), he says that he “wants to be buried / where the kids can find me if they ever need to look,” as if they would abandon him, as their mother seems to have, in the dissolution of the dream of a union forever. Like the broken tin boy, he faces the void of nothing left to hold:

He had planned a joint grave site with the mother of his children before their divorce, a question he is struggling to deal with: “No one’s / avoiding life; no one is ignoring the plans / we made for each other: the small graveyard / near the river behind Pisgah Church.” In his fear of becoming invisible to his loved ones, in “An Accordion in Autumn” (p. 63), he gives himself over to solipsism: “I know everyone wonders what I wonder about beauty,” even though no one asks and he seems foresaken; the color “bruise of apple” mentioned in the same poem recalls the painful fall from innocence to worldly knowledge. The forlorn mood of “For Ashes, For Letting Go” (p. 64) is fraught with the angst of separation and of having to talk to others, as he wonders in trepidation:

He might lose his children. In “Everything is Given to Be Taken Away” (pp. 65-66), he imagines the “sweet terror” of his son’s death, while “sleeping off an afternoon / of steady joy.” “A life full of farewells, none so final and silencing / as a child’s.” The “punished little boy” returns in “If Afternoon” (pp. 67-68), “devastated,” his dreams broken. The narrator seems to contemplate suicide, “if nothing else works, then and only then.” Disillusioned, with “faith a thousand phantoms,” and the once beautiful “sunset as toxic as the word divorce said aloud,” children, in the midst of this fall, seem to realize that knowledge marks the end of pure love, as they

In the final lines of “My Dream of Bob Marley” (pp. 70-72), the children are asleep, but even the finest human qualities cannot ensure future well-being: “there is no bravery / in the world enough to ensure anything.”