The title says notes to a muse. The last stanza says the opposite, and the poem is built to spring that.

Everything up to the turn describes conventional inspiration flowing one way. She is alive inside him, illuminating, coaxing the pencil forward. He writes for her: “just / for you / my ethereal / muse / tonight.” A reader arrives at the final stanza expecting a closing address. Instead: “another missive / in ink / you provide / every day.” She is the correspondent. The poems he thought he was sending were letters he received, and the whole title has to be re-read.

The best phrase in the piece is the least flattering to its author. “a little more / beautiful / nonsense” breaks across three lines so that “beautiful” and “nonsense” each land alone before joining. A poet calling his own output nonsense while still calling it beautiful has struck an unusual balance, and the modesty buys him room for the larger claim he makes four lines later.

The pencil deserves attention because the catalog has been tracking it. “Half a Life Left,” written eight days earlier, closed on “my worn / wondering / pencils / echo.” Here the pencil returns as “my worn nub / of a pencil / scratching.” Same instrument, same wear, and in both poems it stands in for the quantity of writing already done. Two poems in a fortnight measuring a life in graphite is a pattern rather than a coincidence.

The opening stanza is the weakest passage. Inspiring, illuminating, mind, soul — four abstractions in six short lines, arranged in the order any devotional poem would supply. It functions as throat-clearing before the pencil arrives and the writing sharpens.

“Ethereal” is a word this catalog reaches for often, and it works against the poem here. The Muse in these lines does concrete things: she coaxes, she provides, she sends mail. Calling her ethereal at the exact moment she is behaving most like a correspondent pulls in the wrong direction.

A slight poem with one genuinely good idea in it. The reversal in the closing stanza retroactively rewrites the title, and that kind of structural payoff is worth more than the line-by-line writing that precedes it. “Beautiful nonsense” is the other keeper — three words that manage self-deprecation and a real claim at once.

The first six lines are the problem. They arrive in the default order of devotional address and use the default vocabulary, which means a reader has to get past a stanza of abstraction before the poem starts doing anything. Cutting straight to the pencil would lose nothing and would let the concrete imagery set the tone from the first line.

The middle stanza also slackens. “Tomorrow / your smile / another sunrise ray / of hope” is the most generic writing in the piece, and it sits directly before the poem’s best move, so it dilutes the approach to the turn. Rated at his usual standard: the ending is strong enough to carry the poem, but it is carrying it a fair distance.