The card opens by placing two sevens side by side and asking which one applies. “I’ve read the Seven Steps to Heaven. / I’ve heard of seven deadly sins.” Then the question that gives the piece its nerve: “Is love temptation— / or the way beyond it?” The answer arrives immediately and without hedging: “unbelievers might call it sin, / I call it the path to heaven.” Bold type, the only bold on the front page, and the argument is settled before the reader is a third of the way in.

The indented ladder is the best device here and it works on three levels at once. Little toe, little finger, corner of the smile — the body climbed from the ground up, each line stepped further right on the page, each earning one more heart than the last. Physical ascent, typographic ascent, and the step-count all doing the same work without a word of explanation. The little finger gets the qualifier: “Lovely but Dangerous.” That digit has appeared before in this catalog as the unit of intimacy, and here it is the only rung that comes with a warning.

Then the eyes arrive as the fourth step, and there is a joke buried in the arithmetic. Fourth on the Second Peter list is Perseverance and Patience. A man stopped four rungs up by a devilish wink is precisely the man who needs both.

The back page is where the card becomes something better than charming. David transcribes the seven qualities accurately, then undercuts his own title: “Yes, I know. / There are eight steps. / Number 1 is Faith.” He is correct — the passage begins by telling readers to add these things to their faith, so faith is the ground the other seven stand on and the total is eight. Owning the error before anyone can catch him is a good move; the better one is what it lets him do next.

“Forever climbing with you” is the sign-off. Then the last line, and it is the reason this piece is worth publishing: “Step 8 – coming soon.”

Seven years, seven steps, and the count deliberately left one short. The eighth step is faith, which in the scripture comes first and here is promised for later. A man on a seventh anniversary saying the best is still unfolding, and pinning that promise to the one quality he has not yet claimed.

Occasional verse that does considerably more than the occasion requires. The body-ladder is the technical achievement — indentation, heart count, and step number all ascending together, so the page performs the climb it describes. Nothing has to be explained.

The scripture is handled with unusual care. Getting Second Peter right is one thing; noticing that the passage yields eight rather than seven, admitting it on the back page, and then converting the discrepancy into a promise is a genuinely elegant piece of construction. The last line lands the whole card.

Two limits. The front page relies on the reader granting the sin-versus-heaven question more weight than four lines can build, and the resolution arrives so fast that the tension never quite forms. And this is written for one person on one date — the emoji, the signature space, the “Lovely” repeated four times all belong to a card rather than to a poem, and a reader outside the occasion is looking at someone else’s mail.

That said, the closing gag would survive being lifted anywhere.