The structure is the poem. A question is asked, and before a single image arrives, it is refused: “No.” Everything after that is testimony gathered to justify a verdict already delivered. Poems usually argue toward conclusions. This one starts at the conclusion and works backward, and the reversal is what gives it its confidence.

The scene-setting is nearly stenographic. Midnight, thunder, rain, a glowing screen, a man at work. Three sentence fragments, no verbs to speak of, no attempt at atmosphere beyond the plain report of conditions. It reads like a timestamp. Then the admission that turns it: “Watching the Titanic / especially / missing you.” The placement of “especially” between the two lines is the small technical achievement here. It could attach forward or backward — especially watching, especially missing — and the ambiguity is honest about how the two activities have fused.

“Always the hopeless / romantic” is the speaker naming himself, and the self-deprecation buys him permission for what follows.

The philosophical turn is compressed to eight words across five lines: “The void / a whole world // it is / not / vacant.” Breaking “not” onto its own line puts the entire weight of the poem’s argument on a single syllable, and it echoes the “No.” at the top. The speaker refuses the void twice, once as answer and once as description. Then the placement: “It lives / in you.” Inspiration doesn’t come from nothing, because there is no nothing. There is her.

The closing allusion deserves attention. “A woman’s heart / is a deep ocean / difficult to / fathom” reaches for the Titanic — the film he has just told us he’s watching, which contains a well-known line about a woman’s heart being a deep ocean. The borrowing is signposted, not concealed. And “fathom” is the poem’s one genuine pun: a fathom measures depth at sea, and to fathom is to comprehend. The word lets the ocean metaphor and the confession of not-understanding occupy the same syllable. Whether David reached for that consciously is unknowable; it works either way.

The last two lines then decline to resolve the difficulty. He cannot fathom her. He knows she is beautiful. Those are allowed to sit side by side without reconciliation, which is the right ending for a poem that opened by refusing to argue.

Twenty-six short lines that know exactly what they’re doing. The question-then-refusal opening is the best structural idea in this stretch of the catalog, and the poem is disciplined enough not to explain the joke. Breaking “not” onto its own line is a small choice that pays, and the “especially” placement is genuinely deft.

The Titanic allusion is the piece’s most debatable element. Naming the film two stanzas before echoing its most quoted line is either a graceful piece of scaffolding or an overexplanation, depending on the reader. My view is that it works, because the poem is honest about watching a movie at midnight and honest about where the phrase came from. A reader who catches it feels let in on something; a reader who doesn’t loses nothing.

Where the poem is thinnest is “Always the hopeless / romantic,” which is stock phrasing in a poem that otherwise avoids it. The line does structural work — it lowers the speaker before he makes a large claim — but it does that work with borrowed language. That’s the one place a revision would help.