The Bond epigraph is a setup, and the poem spends its full length earning the reversal it performs on it. Shaken, not stirred, is a line about detachment: a man ordering a drink in a way that signals he is not moved by anything. The last four lines take the same two verbs, reverse their order, and turn them inside out. “I will witness you / shaken within / then stirred to life.” Not a drink. A person. And stirring, in Bond’s usage the thing to be avoided, becomes the whole point.

Between those two poles the poem builds a hierarchy of seeing. “Some eyes are built / for surfaces, / never depths” is the governing claim, and it arrives two days after “My Portmanteau” mapped the identical terrain in water — shallows, mid-depths, depths. The two poems are using the same vertical scale, one for thought and one for perception.

The world’s failure is diagnosed precisely: “maybe the world / is comfortable / ignoring what it cannot name.” Not unwilling. Unable. That returns to unlanguage — the coinage from late May for the space between what is felt and what is heard — and pushes it further. What has no name is easier to disregard than to admit.

The neighbor gets four lines now, and the dismissal has been sharpened into something better than dismissal. “She formed some tidy opinion” does the work of contempt without spending any: tidy is the insult, and it implies a judgment that fit comfortably into a small space. Then the line that replaces the earlier flat refusal: “Her sight was never meant / to measure you.” The neighbor is not wrong. She is the wrong instrument. That is a more generous and more devastating position.

For the first time the poem describes her: “the tension of intellect, / crossed with sensual music.” Tension and crossing are both structural words, and the pairing places thought and sensuality under strain against each other rather than in harmony. It is the only physical characterisation in the poem and it does not describe a body.

The kill imagery is the piece’s most aggressive gesture and its most easily misread. “The kill-shot of reflection / no one else sees coming” borrows the sniper’s vocabulary from Bond, but the poem clarifies what dies: “Only you / inspire reflections / that kill perceptions.” Not a person. A way of seeing. And the shot’s effect on the shooter is resurrection — “brings him back to life / from death,” which lands differently in a catalog that has already documented one actual death and one epigram about people lucky enough to die twice.

Then the poem gives up its own authority, and this is the passage that justifies the rewrite. “The mystery of self-reflection is / I have no idea / what you see in the mirror / as I stare into mine.” Two people, two mirrors, no access. A poem that has spent thirty lines insisting the speaker is uniquely qualified to prove her worth concedes that the one reflection he cannot reach is the one she looks at every day. He can testify to what she is. He cannot touch what she believes she is.

The rewrite fixes what the earlier version could not carry. Where the first attempt dismissed the neighbor in six flat lines of self-interruption, this one does it in four and lands on a real idea: she is not mistaken, she is the wrong instrument. “Tidy opinion” is worth the whole revision on its own.

The Bond frame supplies the spine the poem previously lacked. Taking a phrase about being unmoved and inverting it into a promise to move someone is a genuine structural idea, and the poem is patient enough to hold it until the final line.

The mirror stanza is the best new material and the reason the piece succeeds. A poem arguing that one man’s perception constitutes proof needs somewhere to put its own limits, and admitting he has no access to her self-image is the right place. Confidence and humility in the same poem, neither cancelling the other.

Two flaws remain. The kill motif is worked three times — reflections that kill, the kill-shot, reflections that kill perceptions — and the third instance explains what the first two had already conveyed. And “with the quiet certainty / of a truth felt” is the one abstraction in a poem otherwise built from concrete claims; it softens the passage it is meant to strengthen.