The poem is built as a catalog of dispositions, and the ordering is an argument. Live it, teach it, preach it, proselytize it, never know it — the sequence descends from the most private expression of faith to the most performative, and then off the edge into absence. Each stance is given a candle-or-light image, so the whole poem can be read as a series of self-portraits lit differently.

The descent is pointed. To live faith is “a candle illuminating our way” — faith as private navigation, needing no audience. To teach it is “a book of knowledge, substance offered not owned,” which is the poem’s most generous line, insisting the teacher holds knowledge in trust rather than possession. To preach it is “a Bible in hand, passages marked” — still legitimate, but now armed, selective, the marked passages implying an agenda. Then proselytizing, and the poem’s tone sharpens into genuine critique: “A stage—where voices boom to fill the hollow, / and blind eyes echo a borrowed belief.” This is the one stance the poem judges. Volume compensating for emptiness, and followers repeating a faith they never saw for themselves. Borrowed rather than lived.

“Some of us will never know faith / A candle never lit, a portrait in black, the light unseen.” The unlit candle completes the light motif at zero, and “a portrait in black” is the title’s darkest instance — a self-portrait with no illumination to paint by. The Hebrews epigraph echoes here precisely: faith is the evidence of things not seen, and this is the person for whom nothing unseen ever became evidence.

The pivot line reframes everything: “Faith runs ancient, deep in human marrow— / each soul a single portrait.” Marrow makes faith biological, older than doctrine, seated in the body rather than the mind. And “each soul a single portrait” delivers the title’s thesis — faith is not a shared object people hold in common but a self-portrait each person paints alone. No two are the same, and none can be inherited whole, which is exactly what the proselytizing stanza was condemning.

Then the poem locates the speaker. “Some of us are born to seek it / a persistent candle flickering in a self-portrait.” This is where David places himself — not among the livers or teachers or preachers, but the seekers, and the candle is persistent and flickering rather than steady. Faith as an unfinished act, a candle that keeps almost going out and keeps not.

The closing is the turn that makes it a Muse poem rather than a theological one. After all the taxonomy, the italic descent: “I have faith // in you, // and the seeking of perfection.” The object of the speaker’s faith is not God, exactly, or not only. It is her, and the seeking itself. Faith gets relocated from doctrine to a person and to a pursuit, which is the boldest and most characteristic move in the catalog — the same substitution “Testimony of a Muse” made in April, when scripture about spiritual rebirth was redirected toward the Lady. The poem ends where the whole catalog has always pointed.

The most structurally ambitious of the reflective poems in this batch, and the ambition mostly pays. Building a taxonomy of faith and ordering it as a descent from private to performative to absent gives the poem an argument, not just a survey, and the candle-and-light image threading through every stanza holds the structure together without being belabored.

The proselytizing stanza is the sharpest writing — “voices boom to fill the hollow, / and blind eyes echo a borrowed belief” is genuine critique, and the poem earns the right to make it by treating the quieter forms of faith so generously first. “Substance offered not owned” is the line most worth carrying out, a whole ethic of teaching in five words.

The closing relocation of faith from doctrine to a person is the move that makes this David’s poem rather than a general meditation, and it connects the piece to the catalog’s central act — putting the Muse where scripture usually goes.

Two reservations. “Each soul a single portrait” states the title’s thesis outright, and a poem this image-rich could have trusted the pictures to carry it. And the final line, “the seeking of perfection,” is the one abstraction in a poem otherwise built from candles and marrow and stages — it reaches for a concept where the poem had been dealing in things. A more concrete final image would have made a strong close excellent. Still, as the last poem in a long and varied batch, it is a fitting one: a seeker’s poem, ending on faith in a person.