The catalog is overwhelmingly a Muse catalog. This poem is not, and the departure gives it a plainness the love poems rarely reach for. There is almost no figurative language here. A hand goes up. A man stands at a window. A man comes down the stairs. The poem’s entire method is placing two literal memories side by side and declining to interpret them.

The opening observation is the hinge, and it is genuinely acute: a raised palm has no fixed meaning. “Held straight up / palm forward // is either saying hello / or goodbye.” The gesture is identical in both cases. Only direction supplies the meaning, and direction belongs to the person walking, not the person waving. Everything else in the poem follows from this.

Then the two scenes, deliberately unbalanced. The departure is behind glass: father framed in the living room window, a tear “catching the light,” son already in motion. Glass makes the moment observable and untouchable at once, and David lets that do its own work without comment. The arrival is on the other side of a threshold: door opened, stairs descended, a smile that upgrades mid-line to “a wide grin.” The father moves toward the son in the arrival scene and stays fixed in the departure scene. That asymmetry is the poem’s quietest and most accurate detail.

The escalation in the final third is where the piece takes its risk. “A hand— / opening a window, / or closing a door” repeats the poem’s own structure, then the next stanza jumps registers without warning: “opening a box of flowers / or closing a casket.” Flowers and casket arrive in the same breath, the way they do in life. The line lands because the poem has spent its whole length teaching the reader that one gesture holds two meanings, so the reader is already prepared to accept that one hand delivers both the bouquet and the burial.

“Our hands do both” is a four-word thesis, and the shift from “my dad” to “our” widens the poem at exactly the right moment. The closing image folds the argument back into the opening gesture: “Memories in a palm held / forward.” The line break after “held” leaves the palm suspended for a beat before “forward” arrives, which is precisely what a raised hand does.

Restraint is what distinguishes this one. The catalog’s habit is accumulation, image layered on image until the feeling is unmistakable. Here David does the opposite: two memories, one observation about gesture, no instruction to the reader about how to feel. The poem is confident enough to end four words after its thesis.

The father material is handled without a single sentimental adjective. The tear is described only by what it does to light. The grin is described only by widening. A lesser version of this poem would tell us the father was proud, or lonely, or aging. This version tells us he stood at a window, and the reader supplies everything else — which is why the reader feels it.

The flowers-and-casket line is the only place the poem reaches for effect, and reasonable readers will disagree about whether it reaches too far. The jump from domestic thresholds to mortality happens in one stanza with no preparation. My reading is that the poem has already earned it structurally, but it is the seam where a critic would push. Placed in the catalog beside the Muse poems, this piece also raises a question worth sitting with: whether the father material deserves more room than a single short lyric has given it.