The poem opens on a shared nervous system. “Your pain / is my pain— / a single trembling nerve” is not a figure of speech about empathy; the stanza that follows makes it physical. “My hands shake / my feet shiver / just like yours.” Two people with the same symptoms, and the poem’s premise is that neither is describing the other’s condition from outside.

Then the flattest lines in the piece: “We all die. / In our due time.” A proverb, stated without ornament, and it functions as the ground the poem then departs from. The departure is a single word on its own line — “But,” — with a comma that promises more.

What follows is the poem’s difficult centre, and its difficulty is deliberate. The request arrives in military shorthand, then in plain speech, then as a bare fact: end me, mercifully, I’m old. Three attempts at the same sentence, each shorter than the last, the way a person circles something they can barely say. The conditions attached are precise and worth reading closely — not when illness arrives, but “before I lose / my ability to enjoy your smile,” and “when I can’t / end it / on my own terms.” What is being described is the loss of pleasure and the loss of agency, in that order.

And then the poem turns, and the turn is the reason it exists. After the brutality of the request comes what the speaker actually wants: “Be there / with me. // Please.” One word per line, and please standing alone. Everything preceding it was a means to that. The poem asks for death and then reveals it was asking for company.

The rest is gratitude, and it is stated without figure or elaboration — thank you for being here, I love you, the one whose smile comes from her heart. Plainness is the register, and after the violence of the middle it reads as relief.

The final image is the finest thing here and it reorganises the entire poem. “When I nourish the soil / around your toes / remember me.” He becomes the earth she is planted in. This catalog has spent months making her the garden — a forest of rooted reverence, a garden of roses he roots in, a stream that carries him. Here the arrangement reverses completely. She grows, and what feeds her is what he decomposes into. It is a burial image and a gardening image at once, and it is the only place in the poem where he asks for something after death rather than during it.

That request is also the smallest: not to be saved, not to be mourned. Remembered.

The architecture is stronger than the surface. A poem that appears to be about wanting to die turns out to be about wanting someone in the room, and it makes that turn without announcing it — the request for death occupies twenty lines and the request for company occupies four, which is the correct proportion for how those two things actually sit in a person.

The closing image justifies the poem on its own. Reversing the catalog’s established arrangement, so that the man who has spent months rooting in her garden becomes the soil instead, is a genuine development rather than a variation, and “around your toes” keeps it physical where it could easily have gone abstract.

The opening stanza is the other strong passage, and the detail that both of them shake is doing quiet work that a reader may not register consciously.

What holds it here is the writing between those poles. The middle runs to twelve stanzas of one or two lines each, and the fragmentation that reads as difficulty in the first few becomes diffuse by the last. “I’m old” is a flat statement in a poem that has already shown it can do better. And the gratitude section repeats its sentiment four times in slightly different words, where two would land harder. The piece is a genuine draft, and its rawness carries force in the request and costs it elsewhere.