Four lines, and almost nothing happens in them. That stillness is deliberate and it shows in the grammar: the poem contains one participle, one linking verb, and one modal. No action. Nothing moves. For a goodnight wish, where the whole point is that the day has stopped, that absence of verbs is the correct instrument.

What the poem uses instead is apposition — naming something and then immediately renaming it. A hand becomes a door. A bond becomes a devotion. A person becomes a light. Three times the poem sets two nouns side by side and lets the second reinterpret the first, which is the quietest rhetorical move available and the only one used here.

The first pairing is the one that earns the poem. “My outstretched hand, an open door” is conventional enough on its own; what follows is not. “To less of me, and more of you.” An outstretched hand almost always offers the person extending it — help, presence, company. This one opens onto the speaker’s own diminishment. The door leads to a room with less of him in it.

That inverts the usual arithmetic of romantic offering and connects to a position David has taken before. “Prayer Garden Theology,” from late April, argued that a person need not wave their leaves for every passing emotion. This is the same restraint stated as generosity rather than as defence.

The hand also returns something from earlier in the catalog. “Both / the Window and the Door,” written in April about the poet’s father, hinged on a raised palm that could mean hello or goodbye, and on the observation that one hand opens a window or closes a door. Two months later the hand appears again, and this time it is only the door, and only open.

The final break does the last of the work. “You are a lasting light— / we can share.” Isolating those three words after a dash leaves them free to attach two ways: a light we can share, or a plain statement that sharing is possible between them. The poem ends without resolving which, and at that hour neither reading is wrong.

The middle line is where the writing thins. “A quiet bond, a mutual devotion” sets two abstractions in apposition without either one gaining anything from the pairing, and it is the only line of the four that could be lifted from any card.

A miniature with one real idea in it, and the idea is good enough to carry four lines.

“To less of me, and more of you” is the whole poem. It takes the most familiar gesture in the romantic vocabulary and points it in the unexpected direction, and it does so without commentary or emphasis. A reader who moves past it quickly will have missed the poem.

The verbless construction suits the occasion, and the closing line break is well judged — the ambiguity it creates costs nothing and adds a second reading.

What holds it here is that half the poem is furniture. “A quiet bond, a mutual devotion” and “lasting light” are both assembled from stock, and in a four-line poem there is no room to absorb two dead phrases. The catalog has shown repeatedly that David can put a specific object in front of a reader — a clove-scented carnation, a rib playing solo, dust hanging in a studio. Nothing here is visible.

Judged as what it is, a goodnight note rather than a finished poem, it does its job with one line worth keeping.