The governing image is astronomical rather than merely dizzy, and the distinction matters. Eyes spinning in their sockets produce “orbital sunrise and sunset,” which is what an astronaut sees — sixteen sunrises a day, the horizon arriving and departing faster than the body can process. The speaker isn’t stumbling. He is in orbit, moving at speed, and the light keeps changing on a schedule that has nothing to do with him.

What that orbit does to her face is the poem’s best observation: “Each revolution softens your edges.” Anyone who has looked at a beloved face too often knows this happens. Repetition blurs. Details that were once sharp become approximate, and the image in the mind gradually replaces the one in the room. The poem treats this as a loss rather than a comfort.

“A carousel I never chose” is the line where the machinery turns dark. A carousel is a children’s ride, painted and safe, and the only thing wrong with it is that he can’t get off. Involuntary motion runs through the whole piece — spin loose, joins the orbit, lurching, spiraling — and the verbs consistently place the speaker as the object rather than the agent.

“Ditzy, dizzy, deliciously undone” is the poem’s one indulgence, three d-sounds in a row and an adverb that undercuts the distress around it. Read generously, that’s the point: the speaker is enjoying his own vertigo, which is why he hasn’t tried to stop it. Read less generously, it’s the softest line in the poem sitting at its centre.

The final movement carries the argument. “Clarity arrives / only after the spinning slows” is a claim about attention rather than about love. Nothing can be seen while in motion. And what becomes visible when the motion stops is not resolution but a person who has been standing there the whole time: “still, patient, / waiting.” She isn’t spinning. She never was. All the orbital drama belongs to him.

That places this poem beside “The Silken Sword,” written eleven days earlier, where a lightning bolt is slowed until it can be touched. Twice within a fortnight, the resolution arrives as deceleration rather than as arrival — the thing was always reachable, and speed was the obstacle. “Confused,” from four days before this one, works the same territory in a domestic key: discombobulated, dizzy, spinning around and reversing course.

The last two words hold an ambiguity worth noticing. “To remember its center” — a heart’s centre could be its own, meaning he must recover himself, or it could be her, meaning she is what he orbits. The poem does not decide, and the orbital imagery supports both.

A well-controlled poem with one genuinely strong image sustained the whole way through. The orbital conceit never breaks, and the verbs cooperate with it consistently enough that the vertigo becomes physical rather than described.

Two lines do the heavy lifting. “Each revolution softens your edges” is a real observation about how repeated looking degrades an image, and it works because it’s true rather than because it’s clever. “A carousel I never chose” turns a benign object sinister in six words.

The resolution is where it becomes conventional. Clarity after the spinning stops, the beloved standing patient throughout, a reckless heart finding its centre — this is the arrangement most poems of romantic disorientation arrive at, and David arrives at it without complication. It reads as earned, but it does not surprise. The alliterative middle line is the one place the language slackens for the sake of sound.

Compared against the standalone draft in the same working file, this version is materially better: “again, again” beats “over and over again,” “a looping vision of you” beats “a recurring image of beauty,” and cutting “trembling” and “frantic” removes two adjectives that were telling rather than showing.