The title makes a claim the poem then has to defend: that being named is what makes a person safe. Sirens are the test case, and the poem knows it. “A siren to my rhythmic heart, / whose succulent song is no shipwreck / but a naming— / of renewal.”

The whole argument sits in that correction. Sirens in the tradition sing to sailors who are then lost, and what they promise is knowledge — in Homer they offer to tell a man everything about himself. David keeps the offer and removes the wreck. The song still names him. It simply doesn’t drown him. Whether a reader accepts that depends on whether they believe the danger was ever separable from the appeal, and the poem doesn’t argue the point, it just asserts the outcome.

Succulent is the odd word in that stanza and the interesting one. Applied to a song it means rich and tempting; applied to a plant it means a species built to store water and survive drought. In a poem that turns almost immediately to gardens, the second sense is available and probably not accidental.

The transformation follows: “helping me flower, / petal by petal.” The speaker becomes the plant, which reverses the catalog’s usual arrangement — she is normally the flower and he is the one watching. Here she is the garden and he is what grows in it.

The restraint at the centre is the poem’s finest instinct. “Rooting in her garden of roses, / mid-bloom, / her perfume not yet mine to breathe.” He is in the garden and the scent is withheld. Not refused, not absent — simply not yet his. Everything in the poem is held at that same stage: mid-bloom, about to bloom, a scent witnessed only in a future. Nothing is permitted to open.

That suspension is what the ending has to resolve, and it resolves it strangely. “A fragrance crystallized— / a naming, realized.” Crystallizing a fragrance means fixing something volatile into a solid, which is what perfumers attempt and what the poem has been attempting since its first line. Scent that stays. And it rhymes with realized, the only rhyme in the poem, arriving on the final syllable so the two ideas lock together audibly. The naming becomes real at the moment the fragrance stops dispersing.

The weak seam is the fourth stanza. “Your life— / illumination / in the shared garden / that becomes our sanctuary” abandons the flower vocabulary for two abstractions, and it also switches from third person to second — the poem addresses her directly there and nowhere else. That shift is either a deliberate turn toward her or an unedited slip, and the surrounding lines give no evidence.

The siren stanza is the reason to publish this. Taking the oldest image of dangerous attraction in the Western canon and reclassifying it as safety is a genuinely bold reading, and the poem executes it in four lines without explanation or apology.

The sustained suspension is the other achievement. Mid-bloom, about to bloom, a scent witnessed only in the future, a perfume not yet his — the poem holds every one of its images at the moment before completion and never lets one open. That is difficult to maintain across twenty lines, and it gives the piece a tension the closing couplet then discharges.

“A fragrance crystallized” is the right ending: a volatile thing made solid, and the only rhyme in the poem placed exactly where the argument closes.

Two flaws. The fourth stanza breaks the poem’s discipline twice over, swapping the garden vocabulary for illumination and sanctuary, and shifting into direct address for four lines before shifting back. Either change alone would be survivable; together they read as an unedited patch. And “beautiful, blessed” in the opening line is two adjectives doing one job, the sort of pairing the rest of the poem is careful to avoid.