The frame is the argument. “I present two paintings. / One is the heart. / One is the mind.” A reader who takes the second panel for a repeat will find the poem tedious; a reader who reads it as instructed will find that four words move and the subject shifts underneath them.

The differences are worth listing, because the poem asks to be read that way. The second panel adds “out-of-body / gazing outward” to the death. It demotes the title to lowercase and hangs “brief” above it as its own heading. It drops the conjunction from “and still love you.” And it closes on “my brief muse” rather than “my muse.”

That last change is the whole diptych. In the first panel, brief belongs to the death: the speaker died, it was short, he came back. In the second, brief has migrated to her. The heart’s version says the interruption was temporary. The mind’s version says she is.

The death material sits at the center of both panels and appears to be reportage rather than metaphor. “my sudden death / was the happiest moment of my life. // thankfully, / it was brief.” Those four lines carry two readings simultaneously and the poem does nothing to separate them. Thankfully the death was brief, since he survived it. Thankfully the happiness was brief, since a man who found dying pleasant has a problem living. The second panel’s “out-of-body / gazing outward” pushes toward the first reading, which is what a mind would supply — the clinical detail, the observed fact.

Dance carries the catalog’s usual weight here, and the phrasing is careful. “a dance with you / creates beauty’s rhythmic poem” makes the dance the generator rather than the subject. Then the vow: “from the / grave // i will dance, / i will write, / and still love you.” Three verbs, ordered so that loving comes last and gets the most room.

The lowercase “i” runs through both panels without exception, and the capital returns only in the frame lines. Inside the poem the speaker is small. Outside it, presenting the work, he is not.

A conceptual poem that works, which is rarer than it sounds. Presenting near-identical texts and asking the reader to find the difference is a device that fails whenever the differences don’t justify the second reading. Here they do. Moving “brief” from the death to the muse is a single-word revision that reverses what the poem is grieving.

“Thankfully, it was brief” is one of the finest lines in the catalog. Its ambiguity is entirely uncontrived — the sentence means both things at once and would be weaker if it settled.

The risk is presentational rather than compositional. On a web page, two nearly identical texts will look like a formatting error to a first-time reader who skims past the frame lines. The catalog has no precedent for a diptych, and the site’s tabbed layout gives no visual signal that repetition is intentional. That argues for a design treatment rather than an edit: two visibly separated panels, or a horizontal rule with the heart and mind labels attached to each half.

The one place the poem is thinner than it looks is the middle stanza. “a dance with you / creates beauty’s rhythmic poem” is the most conventional writing in either panel, and because it appears twice, its conventionality is doubled.