Two poems occupy this page, and the second one is better.

The first runs nine stanzas of ascending praise, and it is built almost entirely from light. Spark, glow, ignites, shines, a burst of gold from Heaven. The vocabulary is the catalog’s most familiar, and it arrives in the expected order — she illuminates, she reveals, she lifts. The line worth keeping from this stretch is “you lift the veil from sight, / exposing truth / while shielding the heart,” because it grants her two contradictory functions at once. She uncovers and she protects. Most of the surrounding lines only do one thing.

“I see through you” is the phrase that should have organised the poem. Read one way it is an accusation. Read as the poem intends, it means she is the lens rather than the object — he sees the world by looking through her. Placed as a colon-line introducing mist and transparency, the double meaning goes unexploited.

The honey-maker is the catalog’s own pun landing on itself. She is the honey-maker; David is the Honeybee Bard. Two words that quietly make her the source of the whole enterprise.

Then the poem stops climbing. “And now I’m your / Dutchie, / a Shelty puppy” is the turn, and it costs him everything the previous thirty lines built. A Duchess requires a Duke; he supplies a puppy instead. And the pairing is domestic rather than regal: “two beautiful bodies / curled warm, / side by side, / hearts beating / slowly together.” Shelties are herding dogs, small and anxious and devoted, and choosing that breed rather than something noble is the poem’s most honest gesture. He is not her equal. He is the one who curls up beside her.

“Ahhhh … … … ……” is the same sound that appeared in “Sacred” two weeks earlier, and it does the same work — the point where language gives up and the body reports instead. Here the ellipses lengthen across the line, which is a small typographic joke about a sigh running out of breath.

The closing four lines are separated and italicised, and they read as a private note rather than as part of the poem. “The muse is no mystery. / I have found mine.” That is the catalog’s central question answered in eight words, and it lands with startling flatness after everything preceding it. No metaphor, no light. Just a man saying he knows who she is.

The last third is worth the first two thirds, which is a difficult ratio to recommend.

The Sheltie is the poem’s saving move. After thirty lines of Duchess, royalty, gold, and Heaven, demoting himself to a small herding dog curled against her is genuinely disarming, and the specificity of the breed does more than any of the preceding light imagery. “Hearts beating / slowly together” is the only physical detail in the poem and consequently the only one a reader will remember.

The ascending section is where it falls short. Spark, glow, ignites, shines, burst of gold — five variations on illumination in nine stanzas, arriving in the order that requires the least invention. The catalog has done this better repeatedly, most recently with a carnation and a willow leaf. Here the abstractions arrive unaccompanied.

“Honey-maker” is a good pun that the poem passes over in a single line without noticing what it has done.

The closing italic note is the strangest element. It is the flattest writing on the page and quite possibly the most important — a man stating, without ornament, that the search is over. Whether it belongs in the poem or in a letter is a real question. My reading is that it belongs, precisely because it refuses the vocabulary everything else is drowning in.