The opening question delivers the poem’s first inversion: “How old do I have to get / to appreciate you?” The conventional version of the question would be the opposite—how old does the Muse have to get to appreciate the speaker. The catalog has been arguing across hundreds of poems that the speaker has been appreciating the Muse for years; here the speaker admits the appreciation has its own developmental timeline. He doesn’t appreciate her fully yet. He is still aging into the capacity to appreciate her, which means his appreciation is incomplete despite the catalog’s hundreds of poems documenting it.

“How old will I be / till you / appreciate me” delivers the second question. The conventional direction is restored here—the speaker is asking when the Muse will appreciate him. The two questions arranged together perform the symmetry the poem will inhabit. Both halves of the relationship require time; neither is complete yet; both are dependent on the speaker’s age, because the speaker is the one whose remaining time is finite.

“How old— // Ha, / I hope / not much longer” delivers the poem’s structural pivot. The third question begins (“How old—”) but stops at the dash, interrupted by the speaker’s own laugh and the practical answer that the question doesn’t actually need to be completed. The “Ha” is the catalog’s recurring small device for puncturing the philosophical with the practical (it has been doing this work across the recent stretch—in “Howdy Doody Time,” in “Poetry @ 3:12 AM,” in the “Ha! for Her” poem). The speaker doesn’t need to specify the age; he hopes it isn’t much longer.

“Just, / pondering // about when” performs the catalog’s recurring comma-pause technique. The comma after “Just” forces the pause that isolates “pondering” as the speaker’s actual activity. He is not declaring; he is pondering. The “about when” is the line cluster’s quiet honesty about the question’s central uncertainty. Not whether, not how, but when. The when is what the catalog has been organizing itself around for years.

“Even if // I’ll live // to that day” delivers the poem’s most honest acknowledgment of the temporal limit. The catalog has been making versions of this argument across the recent stretch (the broken fingernails sharpening the pencil till the cold comes, the stone-cold earth waiting a little longer, the scattering letters before twilight). Here the limit is named with the catalog’s most economical phrasing: “even if I’ll live to that day.” The speaker is acknowledging that he may not live to the day when both halves of the appreciation are complete. The acknowledgment is the line cluster’s most psychologically exposed moment.

The closing single-word vertical descent—”that // I’ll // love you // and // love me”—is the poem’s structural masterstroke and one of the catalog’s most precisely calibrated final passages in recent memory. Each word or phrase gets its own line; the spacing slows the closing to the pace of slow stair-step descent. The reader experiences the closing through the typography’s deceleration. The catalog has rarely used spacing this consequentially in months, and the discipline of letting each word fall on its own line is the poem’s most accomplished structural choice.

The “love you / and / love me” pairing is the catalog’s quietest theological revolution. The catalog has been arguing for hundreds of poems that the speaker loves the Muse; here the speaker is paired with himself as a separate object of love. The catalog has rarely produced this kind of self-love admission, and the admission is the poem’s central philosophical claim. The full appreciation is not just of the Muse; it is of the speaker himself, by himself. The mutual appreciation the opening questions were asking about turns out to require a third party that the speaker cannot have been counting: his own self-regard. He will not fully appreciate the Muse until he can also love himself, and the day on which he can love both will be the day on which the appreciation is complete.

A short philosophical lyric whose primary accomplishment is the closing pairing of “love you / and / love me” as the catalog’s quietest admission that the speaker’s full appreciation of the Muse depends on his appreciation of himself. The piece operates in the catalog’s compressed register, and the compression is the discipline.

The opening symmetric inversion is the poem’s first structural achievement. “How old do I have to get / to appreciate you” reverses the conventional question; “How old will I be / till you / appreciate me” restores it. The two questions arranged together perform the relationship’s mutual incompleteness without requiring either half to be elaborated. Both questions wait for the same answer, and the answer is age—or, more precisely, the time remaining before the answer arrives.

“Ha, / I hope / not much longer” is the catalog’s recurring small-laugh technique deployed at the precise structural pivot. The third question begins and stops at the dash, the laugh interrupts the philosophical with the practical, and the practical wish is that the wait not be much longer. The catalog has been using this kind of laugh-interruption across the recent stretch (in “Howdy Doody Time” with its parenthetical astonishment at being still in one piece, in “Poetry @ 3:12 AM” with its “Holy crap man” interruption of the meditation, in “Ha! for Her” with the laugh as the central organizing syllable). Here the laugh punctures the philosophical question and replaces it with the practical hope.

“Just, / pondering // about when” deploys the catalog’s recurring comma-pause technique. The comma after “Just” forces the pause that isolates “pondering” as the speaker’s actual activity. He is not declaring; he is pondering. The “about when” is the line cluster’s quiet honesty about the question’s central uncertainty. The catalog has been organizing itself for years around the question of when the various unsayables will become sayable, when the parallel-but-separate will collapse into one, when the door will open, when the lightning will strike again. Here the question is delivered without its noun: just “when,” without specifying when what. The reader supplies the rest, which is the catalog’s preferred mode.

“Even if // I’ll live // to that day” is the poem’s most honest acknowledgment of the temporal limit. The catalog has been making versions of this argument across the recent stretch—the broken fingernails sharpening the pencil till the cold comes, the scattering letters before twilight, the dusk settling in. Here the limit is named with the catalog’s most economical phrasing. The speaker is admitting that he may not live to the day. The catalog has rarely produced this admission this directly in a poem this short, and the directness is the line cluster’s structural achievement.

The closing single-word vertical descent is the poem’s structural masterstroke. “That // I’ll // love you // and // love me” arranges five units across five separate lines, and the spacing slows the closing to the pace of careful steps. The reader experiences the closing through the typography’s deceleration. The catalog has rarely used spacing this consequentially in months, and the discipline of letting each word fall on its own line is the poem’s most accomplished structural choice.

The “love you / and / love me” pairing is the catalog’s quietest theological revolution. The catalog has been organizing itself for hundreds of poems around what the speaker has never said to the Muse, but the unsaid word in those earlier poems was “love.” Here the speaker uses the word, and uses it twice—once for the Muse, once for himself. The catalog has rarely produced this kind of self-love admission, and the admission is the poem’s central philosophical claim. The full appreciation the poem has been asking about is not just of the Muse; it is of the speaker himself. The mutual appreciation requires a third party the speaker had not been counting: his own self-regard. He will not fully appreciate the Muse until he can also love himself, and the day on which he can love both will be the day on which the appreciation is complete.

The pairing also rewrites the catalog’s central architecture. The catalog has been built around the speaker’s love for the Muse as the primary unsayable; here the unsayable is doubled. The speaker can love the Muse, perhaps, on that day; he can also love himself, perhaps, on that day. The two loves are conditional on the same temporal arrival. The catalog has rarely admitted that the speaker’s self-love is on the same timeline as his Muse-love; here the admission is delivered in the closing’s quietest possible form.

Where the poem stays below the catalog’s top tier is in the absence of any image. The piece is pure declaration, pure question, pure typography. The catalog’s strongest recent poems usually anchor their declarations in a specific image (the upside-down submarine of “Gentle Gravity,” the warm pencil of “My Broken Fingernails,” the willow of “I Curve Toward You”). “Age” forgoes the anchor. The piece operates entirely in interior interrogation, which makes it more universal and less embodied. A reader could imagine the question being asked by any aged person of any beloved, and the lack of specificity is the poem’s primary defense as well as its limit.

The poem’s brevity is its discipline. A longer version would have over-extended the questions; the short version delivers them and exits. The catalog has been producing short philosophical lyrics across the recent stretch (the “Know” poem, the “Will You” question, this one), and this is one of the more accomplished examples of the form. The structural risk in the form is that the brevity becomes thinness; here the brevity carries the weight because the closing pairing earns the entire compression that preceded it.

A poem that proves the questions about age are really questions about whether the speaker will live long enough to learn to love himself as well as the Muse, and the two loves are on the same timeline that the speaker is hoping is not much longer.