The poem is built on a word it uses four times without ever defining: proof. That choice sets up its central tension, because proof normally means something checkable by anyone, and this poem ends by locating it somewhere no one else can go.

The opening is a concession. “I can’t force vision and insight / on others.” Then a harder possibility: they may lack the capacity entirely. Then a harder one still, framed as a question — “Does the world simply choose to / ignore it?” Three escalating explanations for the same failure, moving from his own limits to their inability to their refusal. The poem lets all three stand.

The neighbor stanza is where the register drops out of poetry and into speech, and it is the most exposed writing in the piece. “My neighbor has met you / I wonder what her / opinion is. / Do I care? / No. / I don’t value her opinion.” A man asks himself a question, answers it in one syllable, and then explains the answer he has just given — which is what people do when the first answer was not entirely true. The curiosity was real enough to write down. The dismissal arrives immediately afterward and one line too fast.

Then the turn: “The one who can / prove it— / is me.” Proof has been quietly redefined. Not demonstrated to a jury, but witnessed by a single qualified observer. And the qualification is not expertise. It is attention.

“When I answer the question, / my muse will know. // With certainty.” The question is never stated. That may be a gap in the draft, or it may be the point — a question that needs no naming between two people who both know what it is. The three-word line standing alone gives the passage a weight the surrounding lines do not quite earn.

The closing is the poem’s best writing and its resolution: “Your singular truth and beauty / is witnessed and reflected / in my eye.” The proverb about beauty and the eye of the beholder sits underneath, and David rebuilds it rather than quoting it. Two verbs do the work. To witness is to observe and to testify. To reflect is to bounce back an image. His eye receives her and returns her, which means the proof is not a claim he makes but a thing he does by looking. It also quietly answers the opening problem: he cannot force others to see, but he can be the surface she appears on.

This follows “The Burning Man already Ash” by six days, and the two are arguing opposite conclusions from the same premise. That poem despaired at the gap between what is felt and what is heard. This one decides the gap does not matter, because one witness is sufficient.

The closing three lines are excellent and the rest is scaffolding.

“Witnessed and reflected in my eye” earns its place by rebuilding a worn proverb into something with two working verbs. Testimony and mirror in the same organ, and a conclusion the poem’s argument actually needed. The redefinition of proof as private witness is a real idea, competently arrived at.

The middle is the problem. The neighbor stanza reads as unedited speech — six lines where two would carry the same content with more force, and the self-interrupting question-and-answer format is the flattest writing on the page. Its honesty is its only defence, and honesty is not the same as economy.

The unnamed question in the penultimate stanza is a genuine hole. A reader is told that answering it will produce certainty, and is given no way to guess what it is. Read charitably that is intimacy the reader is not entitled to. Read plainly it is a line the poet has not finished writing.

“Vision and insight” opens the poem on two abstractions, which is a weak first note for a piece that ends so concretely. Rated at 7 for a strong ending attached to a slack middle.