The shortest complete statement in the batch, and it is built as a maxim rather than a lyric — closer to the “Craftsman’s Law” register than to the Muse poems. Its subject is the pairing of will and skill, and its claim is total: with both, “no obstacle is too high to conquer.”

The internal rhyme is the engine. “Will and the skill” chimes inside the first line, and the near-identical shape of the two words — one letter apart — enacts the poem’s argument that they belong together. Will without skill is wish; skill without will is idleness. The rhyme fuses them into a single capacity, and the poem’s whole force depends on that fusion sounding inevitable, which it does.

The turn is in the second couplet, and it is a large one for four lines to carry. “Even facing death is another path / forward and upward.” Death is the ultimate obstacle, the one that cannot be conquered by definition, and the poem refuses that definition. It reclassifies death as a direction rather than a wall — not the end of forward motion but a continuation of it, and specifically an ascent. “Forward and upward” makes death a step in the same direction the living were already traveling.

This lands differently inside this particular catalog than it would in isolation. The recent poems have documented a near-death, an epigram about dying twice, a request from a hospice bed, and a self-erasure in the desert. Against that run, “even facing death is another path forward” reads not as an abstract maxim but as a position arrived at — a man who has thought a great deal about death lately, deciding to treat it as motion rather than termination. The line has weight because the catalog has earned it.

Whether the reframing convinces is the reader’s to decide, and the poem does not argue for it. It asserts. That is the nature of a maxim: it states a stance and lets the reader test it against their own experience. The confidence is the content.

An aphorism rather than a poem, and it should be judged as one. On those terms it is well made: the will/skill internal rhyme is memorable, the two words’ near-identical shape reinforces the claim that they are inseparable, and the whole thing is compact enough to be carried out of the room whole. That is what a maxim is for.

The death reframing is the ambitious part, and its strength depends entirely on context. Standing alone, “even facing death is another path forward” risks sounding like motivational-poster optimism — the kind of frictionless uplift that does not survive contact with actual dying. Inside this catalog, following months of poems that have looked at death without flinching, it reads as harder-won, a stance rather than a slogan.

Held at the middle of the range because it is more statement than poem. There is no image, no turn beyond the reframing, no texture to reward a second reading the way the lyric poems do. It says one thing clearly and stops. For a maxim that is success; against the stronger poems in the batch it is necessarily slighter.