This poem about the meeting of mental illness and heartbreak begins with a speaker describing what happens when she opens and closes her eyes. Each time she shuts her eyes, the world around her disappears, or "drops dead." When she opens them, it comes back to life. Addressing someone in the second person, she tells them, "I think I made you up inside my head." Throughout the poem, she continues to repeat two concepts—first, describing the way the world disappears when she closes her eyes, and second, telling this addressee that she might have invented them.
Describing what she sees when she opens her eyes to the world around her, she lists an array of colors: blue and red stars that dance across the sky, followed by a rush of blackness. But, when she closes her eyes, that chaos disappears and she instead recalls a dream about her loved one. Addressing the loved one in the second person again, she remembers the way they soothed and even seemed to charm her with songs and kisses. She describes a process of simultaneous seduction and madness, recounting the way that her addressee's seemingly magical powers made her feel "insane." However, chaos returns in the next stanza. The speaker describes an apocalyptic, biblical scene in which God, angels, demons, and even hell itself appear and then crumble as soon as she shuts her eyes.
In a more reflective, sadder tone, the speaker tells her addressee that she hoped, and expected, they'd return to her. But that never happened, and now she's getting older and can't even remember her lover's name. In fact, she said, she would have been better off loving a thunderbird—a mythical creature from certain indigenous American traditions. After all, the thunderbird would have returned in the spring, unlike the person she once loved. Concluding the poem, she stresses one more time that she feels as if she's invented this person in her head.
