The subtitle is doing structural work the poem then earns. A reprise in music is a return of an earlier theme, and this poem is literally that — the curve motif has appeared before, in “Framed in Air” and “I Curve Toward You,” and here it returns transposed. The poem knows it is repeating itself and makes the repetition its subject. The final couplet closes the loop: “I get a reprise / every time I see you.” The poem about reprises is itself one, and seeing her is the trigger that plays the theme again.

The opening admits the pattern. “I always talk about curves / through space and time” is David acknowledging his own preoccupation — the general relativity register the earlier poems reached for, mass bending spacetime. Then: “But closer to home—” and the poem descends from cosmology to things a hand can touch.

The examples are well chosen because each one is a curve that produces something. “A violin’s hourglass form quivers in sound” — the instrument’s shape is why it resonates; the curve is functional, not decorative. “A surfer’s athletic frame dissolves to match a hungry wave” — a body curving to fit another curve, form answering form. These aren’t ornamental curves; they’re curves that do work, which sets up the claim that her curves do work too.

The little finger returns, and its return is the poem’s clearest thread to the catalog. It appeared in “I Curve Toward You” and again in “A Petal,” each time as the smallest unit of intimacy. Here “even your little finger / shows infinite beauty at its finest” places the smallest digit at the end of the descent from spacetime to body — the curve motif has traveled from the cosmos to a fingertip.

The poem’s weakest stretch is its most direct. “Never doubt how important you are” and “Your curves are part of what makes our life worthwhile” abandon the geometry for plain reassurance, and the plainness costs the poem its through-line. These are the lines of a card rather than the argument the curve conceit was building. The poem is stronger when the curve is doing the talking than when the speaker steps out from behind it to reassure her directly.

The violin returns at the close and redeems the ending. “Like a violin string / finally settled into perfect pitch” brings back the instrument from the third stanza, now tuned, and the reprise couplet lands on it. A string settling into pitch is a small physical event — tension finding its exact point — and the poem uses it to describe what seeing her does. The theme resolves.

A self-aware poem that turns its own repetition into its subject, which is the right move for a motif the catalog has run three times now. Naming itself a reprise, then ending on the claim that she is the reprise, gives the piece a frame the earlier curve poems didn’t have.

The curve examples are the strength. A violin’s resonant shape, a surfer’s body matching a wave — these are curves selected because they produce something, and that functional emphasis sets up the argument that her curves are load-bearing too rather than merely admired. The violin returning at the close, now tuned to perfect pitch, gives the poem a clean musical resolution that its reprise conceit had promised.

The middle sags where the poem stops trusting its own device. “Never doubt how important you are” and “makes our life worthwhile” are direct reassurance, and they read as a greeting card interrupting a genuinely interesting argument about geometry. The poem is at its best behind the conceit and at its weakest when it steps out to state the sentiment plainly. Cutting those two lines would tighten the descent from spacetime to fingertip considerably.