The subtitle is the key to the whole construction. An octave spans eight notes; a fractured octave is one where a note is missing or wrong. From there the poem builds an entire numerology out of an accident, and the arithmetic holds up under inspection.

Eight recurs everywhere. The title is a fraction with eight in the denominator. The fall happens at 3:08. Day Eight asks about ribs. And 3:08 read as an interval is three and eight — the distance from a root note to the octave above, which is precisely the span a fractured octave would fail to complete. Whether David worked this out deliberately or arrived at it by ear, the numbers cooperate.

The opening is one enormous unpunctuated sentence, and it should be read as a deliberate imitation of what a fall feels like from inside. Tripping, falling, breaking, hurting, standing, staring — six participles with no full stop to rest on, ending in the flat absurdity of a weather report at three in the morning. Thunderstorms. The forecast arrives as its own line, and there is no better image for the mind grabbing at irrelevant information while the body registers damage.

Then the detail that makes the poem honest rather than merely clever: “while the 1/8th cup of piss leaks into my shorts.” A lesser writer would omit this. Including it establishes that the poem is not going to flatter its narrator, and it makes the fraction in the title do double work — a measure of urine, a musical interval, a slice of pie four lines later.

The day-log structure compresses twelve days into a page, and the entries get shorter as they go, which is what recovery actually does to attention. “lesson learned: the floor always wins” is the kind of thing a person says out loud to an empty room. “vodka the notes / ice can’t reach” is more troubling and the poem knows it — ice for what can be reached, alcohol for what can’t, stated as flatly as the ice.

Day Eight is the piece’s best joke and its worst news: “Do I have / 8 ribs? / I count 7 / and one that’s playing solo.” A rib playing solo is a rib that has separated from the ensemble. The count is wrong, anatomically, and that’s the point. He’s counting what hurts, not what’s there.

The Viennese Trichord is the poem’s most demanding reference and its most precise. It’s the three-note set the Second Viennese composers built dissonance from, containing intervals that refuse to resolve. Assigning it to a clicking rib gives the injury a name from music theory rather than medicine, and it means the sound in his chest is not pain so much as a chord that will not close.

The final three lines turn the clock into a caller. “It’s been calling since 3:08. / Should I answer at 3:09?” One minute later is the smallest possible step forward, and framing recovery as answering a phone is the wittiest thing in the poem.

The most technically ambitious poem in the catalog. Running an injury log through a musical framework could easily have been a gimmick; it holds because the two systems keep finding real correspondences rather than forced ones. A rib playing solo, a chord that won’t resolve, a clock reading as an interval — each one arrives from the material rather than being imposed on it.

The unpunctuated opening is a genuine technical success. Sixty words with no place to stop reproduces the experience it describes, and the abrupt one-word landing on “thunderstorms” completes the effect.

The poem’s willingness to be undignified is what elevates it. The soiled shorts, the one foot stuck and the other sliding, the vodka reaching what ice can’t. None of this makes the narrator look good, and all of it makes the poem trustworthy. The alcohol entries in particular sit there without commentary or defense, which is a harder choice than either confessing or omitting.

Two flaws. “A cheery slice of pie / I had mine” is the one stanza where the wordplay outruns the feeling, and the tonal jump to cheeriness sits awkwardly between the vodka and the rib count. And the middle day-entries lean on their bold headers to supply structure the lines themselves don’t quite earn; Days Two through Four are three fragments where two would do.