Three poems carry this date, and their range is the interesting thing. One is bitter, one is philosophical, and this one is unguarded. Placed beside “I’m too old” from the same day, “Simple” reads as the other half of a divided mind: the same man who called himself a piece of concrete describes here a heartbeat warm against his palm.

The opening stanza is a slow-motion observation, built from small independent clauses that each report one physical fact. A lip lifts. Eyes focus. A heart opens. The parenthetical — “(on me?)” — is the poem’s best moment and its most honest. Inside a tender scene, the speaker interrupts himself to check whether he is actually the object of her attention. Doubt, in parentheses, in the second line. It saves everything that follows from complacency.

“The moon’s radiance / adds a crown” is the one conventional flourish, and it passes quickly. What follows is far more specific: “A heart extended / a thump felt / warm against my palm.” That’s not metaphor. Someone has placed a hand on a chest, or a chest against a hand, and felt an actual beat. The catalog reaches often for the cosmic register; this is one of the rare moments it settles for the tactile, and the poem is better for it.

Then the cat. “The world pauses as / my cat’s purr / adds to your rhythm.” Sammy has appeared across the catalog as a domestic anchor, and here the animal does structural work — the purr and the heartbeat become one shared rhythm, and the poem’s whole vocabulary of tenderness turns out to be vibrational. Two hearts and one cat, all keeping time.

“I accept— / fully, / lovingly” is the pivot from receiving to offering, and what he offers is deliberately small. Not devotion, not eternity. An umbrella. A pillow. The promise is scaled to weather and tiredness rather than to fate, and the modesty is the argument: love as the person who shows up with the practical item. Setting that beside the enormous claims elsewhere in the catalog, the reduction reads as hard-won rather than thin.

The closing two words strand themselves at the bottom of the page. “only / You” is the poem’s only piece of typographic emphasis, and after thirty lines of unbroken plainness it functions like a signature.

The title sets a standard the poem mostly meets. Its best writing is its least decorated: the heartbeat against the palm, the cat’s purr joining her rhythm, the umbrella and the pillow. Each of those is an object or a sensation rather than a claim, and each one lands.

The parenthetical doubt in line two is the piece’s sharpest instrument, and it’s worth noting how much work two words do. Without it the opening stanza would be a straightforward catalog of a beautiful woman being beautiful. With it, the reader is inside a man who isn’t sure the moment belongs to him.

Where the poem loosens is in the middle. “Simple treasure,” “the moon’s radiance adds a crown,” “a smile so demure,” and “that fresh spring fragrance of you” cluster four conventional phrases in close succession, and the accumulation dilutes the specificity around them. Cutting two would strengthen the whole. The moon crown in particular is doing nothing the heartbeat isn’t doing better.

The ending is right. Stopping at “whenever needed” would have been serviceable; the isolated “only / You” gives the poem its closing beat without adding a word of explanation.