The premise is small and completely recognisable: a man renovates his house and his body refuses to update. He walks to where things used to be. He reverses, spins, stubs a toe. Anyone who has moved a coffee maker three feet knows this.

What lifts it is where the poem lets that failure spread. Midway through, without changing tone, the disorientation stops being spatial: “Standing in the tub behind the shower curtain, / I was going to say / I love you — // but I stumble.” The declaration is interrupted by the same architecture that keeps misdirecting his feet. He was going to say it in the old bathroom, behind the old curtain, and the new glass and granite has no place for that sentence. The poem never comments on this. It moves straight to the stubbed toe.

The curtain is the hinge and it works twice. First as literal shower curtain, the thing he was standing behind when he meant to speak. Then as “this two-sided curtain of thought— / old and new, familiar and fresh,” which is the poem’s only piece of overt metaphor and arrives before the literal curtain does, so a reader meets the figure first and the object second. That ordering makes the bathroom scene land as recognition rather than illustration.

“Habit persists — my left not knowing my right” borrows a phrase about concealment and repurposes it for simple bodily confusion. The original means deliberate ignorance between two parties. Here it means a man whose own halves have stopped coordinating, which is funnier and sadder at once.

“A toe stubbed / in my own new Eden” is the best line. Eden is where everything is new and nothing has gone wrong yet, and the first thing that happens in this one is an injury caused by not knowing your way around. The possessive matters — he built this paradise himself, and it is defeating him.

The ending resolves nothing and is right not to. “Too many possibilities / too many doors / this side or that, / I stand, off balance.” Then four words that redirect the entire poem: “With you in sight.” He is disoriented, off balance, unable to say what he meant, and she is visible the whole time. Whether that is comfort or the reason for the paralysis, the poem declines to specify.

A domestic poem that finds something larger without straining for it. The renovation conceit is ordinary by design, and David resists every opportunity to inflate it — no meditation on change, no lesson about impermanence. He just walks into the wrong room repeatedly and lets the reader notice that something else has gone missing in the rearrangement.

The buried centre is what makes it. Placing the unsaid “I love you” in the middle of a poem about stubbed toes, giving it no more emphasis than the granite, is a considerable act of restraint. A weaker version would have ended there. This one keeps going to the toe, which is exactly what happens when a moment passes.

“My own new Eden” earns its allusion, which is more than most Eden references manage.

Where it thins is the fourth line. “Discombobulated, dizzy, fallen” stacks three words for one effect, and “discombobulated” is a comic register the rest of the poem doesn’t use. The closing stanza also repeats a structure it has already used — “too many possibilities / too many doors” echoes the this-side/that-side pattern a third time, when twice had been sufficient.