The epigraph explains the poem’s own manufacture, which is unusual and useful. David records a one-line compliment — if beauty grew on trees, you’d be a forest — and then watches it become “a cathedral of vaulted arches / built—souly—from thought.” That coinage does real work: souly is soul plus solely, meaning both built entirely from thought and built out of soul. And the shift he describes, from “You’re Beautiful” to “You’re Being, Reorders Mine,” is the difference between a compliment and a rearrangement.

Hushed is what the compliment became.

“Rooted reverence” sets the terms in two words. Reverence is usually directed upward; rooting it puts the holiness underground, in the part of a tree nobody sees. The poem then builds a forest that behaves like a cathedral without ever naming one — vaulted arches were in the epigraph, and here they are only implied by canopy, hush, and a shaft of light coming down.

The fox is the poem’s finest invention and it appears twice, which most readers will only register on a second pass. First: “Even the sharp fox pauses— / unsure whether to kneel / or flee.” Sharp is exactly right for a fox, and the two options are the only two available responses to something genuinely sublime — worship or run. The animal cannot choose, which is the honest answer. Then, thirty lines later, the fox returns transformed into “the foxy curve / my dreams call pillow.” The creature that couldn’t decide whether to kneel becomes the shape of a body in a bed. Reverence and desire turn out to be the same animal.

“The thorn and the feather” compresses her into two textures, and “steadfast presence” is the only abstraction in the line, tethered on both sides by things a hand could feel.

The poem’s central question is its strongest thinking: “what essential you / remains unknown, // the one thing / that makes me // wonder?” Wonder is broken onto its own line after two line breaks, so the word arrives isolated and does double duty — to wonder as in to marvel, and to wonder as in not to know. The poem argues that they are the same state. What remains unknown is not an obstacle to awe; it is the supply.

“In held stillness, / in the dark forest of my mind” walks knowingly into Dante’s opening — the dark wood a man finds himself in midway through life. David is well past midway, and where the Inferno offers a lost soul with no path, this poem finds sanctuary and an illuminated path instead. The allusion is used to be contradicted.

One of the most fully realised poems David has written. It takes a throwaway compliment and builds a coherent world out of it, and every element in that world does structural work rather than decorative work.

The fox is the achievement. Introducing an animal caught between kneeling and fleeing, then bringing it back as the curve of a sleeping body, links the poem’s two registers — the sacred and the erotic — without a word of commentary. Most poems that attempt this seam announce it. This one lets a fox carry it.

The question at the centre is the best thinking here, and the line break isolating “wonder” is the right technical choice for it. So is the Dante echo, used to disagree with rather than to borrow from.

Two small strains. “Musky rain-soaked earth” reaches for three modifiers where petrichor needs one good image, and it is the only place the poem overdescribes. And “your essence / pulls me in” is the one abstraction that isn’t anchored by something physical, sitting awkwardly between the breeze and the thorn.

Publishing Origin as epigraph is the right call. It gives readers the seed without asking them to admire a fragment as a finished poem, and it lets the souly coinage survive, which would otherwise be lost.