The title is a joke the poem tells on itself. “Flock It / I heard that phrase / never understood what it meant.” The pun sits one letter away from a curse, and David plays innocent about it — a man claiming not to understand a phrase everyone understands. The bird sense is live too, given how many sparrows and doves populate the recent work. The poem lets both readings hang and commits to neither, which is the right amount of attention to give a title pun.

Then the poem does something unusual for this catalog: it looks closely at an imperfect face. The Muse poems have spent months on radiance and light and cosmic scale. This one itemizes flaws. A nose that bends one way, a lip up on the left and down on the right, one brow bare and the other “as full as / a bushy squirrel tail.” That last image is the poem’s best and its funniest — a squirrel tail is a genuinely strange thing to find on a face, and the specificity makes the whole catalog feel observed rather than invented. Someone has actually looked at this brow.

The conditional structure is doing quiet work. Every flaw is introduced with if, which holds them all at a slight distance — hypothetical, provisional, not quite asserted. He is not saying her face is crooked. He is saying even if it were, and the if protects her while the details describe her.

The pivot is deliberately abrupt: “I, / do not care.” The comma after the isolated I is the poem’s one piece of punctuation doing real work — it puts a beat between the self and the statement, so the declaration arrives with a small pause of emphasis. What follows corrects every asymmetry by refusing to see it. “Your smile to me / is always straight, level.” Not that the smile is straight; that it is straight to me. The distortion is real and his eye declines to register it.

This is the same argument “Only In My Eye” made three weeks earlier — that the witness’s perception is what counts, and that others simply lack the instrument. Here the claim is gentler and more domestic. No Bond frame, no kill-shot. Just a man saying her crooked features look level to him.

The ending is the poem’s most vulnerable moment and its best judgment. After all the confident dismissal comes a single hedge: “Your brow only shows / the happiness of your eyes // Hopefully, / when you see me.” Hopefully undoes the certainty of everything above it. He is sure her face is perfect to him; he is not sure she is happy to see him. The poem spends eighteen lines refusing to doubt her appearance and then, in its last two lines, doubts whether she wants him there. The real asymmetry in the poem turns out not to be in her face.

A love poem that works by cataloging flaws, which is rarer and harder than cataloging virtues. The squirrel-tail brow is the standout — a comic, specific, faintly absurd image that convinces a reader the face is real. Nothing in the poem’s inventory could have been invented from a template.

The structure earns its ending. Eighteen lines of mounting confidence — the flaws don’t matter, the smile is level, the lips inviting — set up a final hopefully that pulls the floor out. Relocating the doubt from her face to her feelings, in the last two lines, is a genuine turn, and it recasts everything before it as a man reassuring himself about the easy thing because he is unsure of the hard one.

Two limits. The middle inventory, while well observed, runs one asymmetry long — nose, lip, brow, and then the brow again in more detail; trimming would sharpen the pivot. And “Your lips are always / inviting” is the one line built from stock, sitting between two that are freshly seen. Rated at 8 for the squirrel tail and the ending, both of which are better than the poem around them needed to be.