Four movements, and the sequence is doing structural work rather than just collecting fragments. Wound, praise, distraction, mortality. Each section hands something to the next.

The opening image is the most physically committed writing in the catalog. A pen becomes “the sharp shard / of pen” that “pierces / soul,” and the blood it draws is real enough to drip down a hand. Then the transformation that gives the piece its title: blood dries to rust. That’s chemically accurate — iron oxidizing, the same reaction in a wound and in a hinge — and David builds the entire poem on it without ever explaining the connection. The pun lands three stanzas later: “blood dries / to flaky rust / not trust.” Rust and trust rhyme, and only one of them holds.

The Beatles passage is the poem’s hinge and its boldest move. “Mother Mary” in that song is generally understood to be McCartney’s own mother, and David hears her as something else: “wisdom / in words softly / delivered / through / a muse.” He then does something rare in this catalog — he asks whether his reading is right. “Is that what he meant? / I don’t know.” Two lines later, “But I think / I do.” A poet permitting himself doubt about his own interpretation, and then quietly overruling it.

The wand is the section’s most poignant object. “I have a / used wand / an artifact I bought” — secondhand magic, purchased rather than inherited, and it turns out to be “the / splintered stick” waved over a wound it cannot close. Splintered wood over a bleeding hand is a fairly precise account of what writing does for pain.

The middle movement changes temperature completely, and the syntax there rewards slow reading. “Sometimes / the most intelligent person is you / in the room” delays the qualifier so the compliment arrives twice. Then “Always / you’re the most beautiful person I know / sometimes” runs an absolute and a hedge on either side of the same statement. It reads as a man being scrupulously honest inside praise.

The stop sign is the best thing here and possibly the best single image of the catalog. “I stopped at a stop sign / waited for it to turn green.” Anyone who has driven while consumed by something knows exactly that failure — the mind supplying the wrong protocol entirely. It is funny for about two seconds. Then the poem follows the thought where it goes: “Some day / I’ll miss the road’s curve. / Swerve.” The joke and the danger occupy the same behavior.

The close earns its sound. Rust, dust, trust, just — four rhymes descending one word per line, each shorter than a breath. Rust becomes dust, which is both corrosion and the burial service, and the last thing standing after the body oxidizes is trust in her.

Where “Caustic Revelation” tried four endings, this poem uses its four sections as a progression and lands once. The blood-to-rust chemistry is a genuine conceit rather than a decoration, and it pays off twice — first as sound in the rust-trust rhyme, then as image in the closing descent to dust.

The stop sign passage would justify the poem on its own. It works because it reports a real cognitive failure rather than inventing a metaphor for one, and because David doesn’t rush to explain it. The follow-through into the missed curve is where the writing turns unnerving, and deliberately so: a man noticing that the same distraction which makes him laugh at an intersection could kill him on a bend. Readers who take the driving passage as more than figurative will find it hard to shake, which is an argument for the poem rather than against it.

The weak seam is the second movement. “You Know Why?” and “Sometimes” carry two headings for what amounts to one short lyric, and its diction — elegance, beautiful, the gold path — is softer than the writing on either side of it. Placed between the pen wound and the stop sign, it reads as a breath rather than a section. Either it wants developing or it wants folding into the movement that follows.